Janet Yellen
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Joe Biden is seeking advice from former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who ran monetary policy while the Democratic nominee served as vice president.
Yellen, now a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution, was among a handful of economists who on Thursday briefed Biden about an economy that has been reeling during the five-month coronavirus pandemic, according to the campaign.
Among those joining Yellen were Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and who served as Biden’s chief economic advisor from 2009-11; Heather Boushey, president and CEO at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth; Harvard University professor Raj Chetty, Michigan State University professor Lisa Cook, and Biden senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan.
A release from the campaign stated that the group has “an array of different specialties and backgrounds.”
Bernstein is a widely recognized progressive who appears often on CNBC; Chetty is known for his work in racial and economic inequality; Cook has been a leader in trying to include more Black women in the field of economics; and Boushey’s think tank also focuses on income inequality.
As for Yellen, she most recently made her mark steering the Fed out of its financial crisis-era policies, ushering through the first rate hike in seven years in 2015 then rolling back the growth of the central bank’s balance sheet that had occurred through bond purchases aimed at stimulating growth.
However, when her term expired in 2018, President Donald Trump chose not to reappoint her, instead opting for then-Fed Governor Jerome Powell, whom the president since has criticized harshly.
Yellen has avoided shows of political partisanship, and it’s not clear whether her decision to meet with Biden represented an endorsement. She did not immediately return a request for comment. Brookings also did not respond to an inquiry.
Yellen did push back indirectly on some of Trump’s Fed criticism. She joined former chairs Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that stressed the importance of an independent Fed free of political pressure.
Former Fed chairs often stay out of politics, though Volcker did endorse Barack Obama in 2008.
