Profile and Career of Janet Yellen, the First Female Treasury Secretary of the United States

JAKARTA – Janet Yellen born August 13, 1946, Brooklyn, New York, USA is an economist, who currently serves as the United States Secretary of the Treasury. She is the first woman to hold the position.

Yellen also served on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Fed). Yellen graduated summa cum laude in economics from Brown University in 1967 and received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971.

He then worked as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University until 1976. In 1977-1978, he worked as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and in 1978-1980 he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In 1980, Yellen joined the faculty of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted research and taught macroeconomics at all levels, and received numerous teaching awards.

Yellen was appointed Bernard T. Rocca, Jr. Professor of Business and International Trade in 1992 and Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Economics in 1999. She later became professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business.

In 1994, Yellen took a leave of absence from Berkeley to become a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a position she held until 1997. She then left The Fed to become head of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers until 1999. She also chaired the Organization’s Economic Policy Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Yellen returned to Berkeley in 1999 and taught there until 2004, when she was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was named vice chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama nominated her to be the next head of the Federal Reserve System.

There was some controversy surrounding his nomination, especially as many Republicans believed he would place too much emphasis on reducing unemployment and not enough on controlling inflation. Nevertheless, in January 2014 he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 56 to 26, the smallest confirmation margin for a Federal Reserve System chief in history. His four-year term began on February 3, 2014.

Upon taking office, Yellen began the process of reversing some of the policies that had been put in place in response to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. In particular, she oversaw a program of selling Treasury bonds and mortgages that the Fed had purchased to stimulate the economy. Her tenure was also notable for job and wage growth, both of which occurred while she kept interest rates low.

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Yellen left the Fed in February 2018, after President Donald Trump failed to nominate her for a second term. She was replaced by Jerome H. Powell. According to Britannica Money, in 2020, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Yellen as US Treasury Secretary. She was confirmed by the Senate in January 2021 by a vote of 84 to 15.

Yellen holds a Juris Doctorate from Brown University and a Doctorate in Humanities from Bard College. Throughout her academic career, she has written extensively on a variety of topics, particularly macroeconomics and unemployment dynamics. She is married to George A. Akerlof, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.

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