Janet Yellen to urge lawmakers to ‘act big’ on economic stimulus relief at Senate confirmation hearing
Yellen, 74, spent years as a professor before entering politics as head of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1990s. She chaired the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, playing a key role in the economic recovery from the Great Recession with a studied approach that helped push down the unemployment rate over time. President Trump broke with tradition when he opted not to reappoint her to the top Fed job.
She was the first woman to chair the Fed and will become the first female treasury secretary if confirmed by the Senate. She would replace Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.
Her immediate challenge will be helping to shepherd Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion relief package through a narrowly divided Congress. Republicans are already voicing skepticism about the price tag of Biden’s plan, citing the nation’s ballooning deficits after Congress already committed some $4 trillion to pandemic relief legislation in a series of bills last year.
“Neither the President-elect, nor I, propose this relief package without an appreciation for the country’s debt burden. But right now, with interest rates at historic lows, the smartest thing we can do is act big,” Yellen says in her testimony. “In the long run, I believe the benefits will far outweigh the costs, especially if we care about helping people who have been struggling for a very long time.”
Following her nomination, Yellen reported in a financial disclosure form that she earned more than $7 million in speaking fees from multiple large corporations, including Goldman Sachs, in the two years since leaving the Federal Reserve. She pledged in a filing to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to seek written authorization from ethics officials to participate in matters involving firms from which she’d received compensation.
