Who is Janet Yellen, Joe Biden’s pick to head the US Treasury Department?

Team Udayavani, Nov 27, 2020, 3:08 PM IST

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as US treasury secretary.

Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is a well-known labour economist with a career spanning over three decades in policy-making

She was born and raised in New York City. Yellen earned a degree in economics from Brown University before completing a PhD at Yale.

The 74-year-old economist spent years teaching at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley before making her initial foray into Democratic Politics as head of former US President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1990s.

According to BBC, the 74-year-old economist previously served as head of America’s central bank and as a top economics adviser to former President Bill Clinton. She is credited with helping steer the economic recovery after the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing recession.

She is married to George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist whom she met while working as a researcher at the Fed in the 1970s. They have one son, who is also an economics professor