Yellin’ About Yellen

I haven’t been following the issue of choosing a new Federal Reserve chairperson that closely, but today lots of people are writing about it, and it’s jaw-dropping stuff.

Apparently the main contenders are Lawrence Summers (booooo!) and Janet Yellen (yay!). Yellen is vice chairwoman of the Fed’s board of governors, and everybody who understands this stuff says she would be an awesome choice.

But the resistance to Yellen has taken what we might call a patriarchal turn. Some guy with the improbable name of Cardiff Garcia writes,

This particular plank of support for a Yellen candidacy was reinforced by the Wall Street Journal’s analysis on Monday of FOMC forecasts since 2009. It turns out that she has also been successful, more than any other FOMC member, at predicting the short-term trajectories of the major economic indicators.

Obviously there’s no guarantee that this would continue, but at the very least this serves to further disprove one very peculiar notion given by Ezra Klein’s sources last week for preferring Larry Summers to Yellen — specifically the notion that “the market” trusts Summers more, because (we guess?) he’ll be a tough manly man on inflation while she’s a homeless-hugging San Francisco hippie female person who will let the US economy revert back to the hellspun apocalyptic landscape of the 1970s, ushering in another era of frozen wastelands and broken homes and shattered dreams.

Say what? Paul Krugman explains that last bit:

I’ve spent five years and more watching the inflationphobes, who weren’t particularly sensible to begin with, descend into shrill unholy madness. They could have reacted to the failure of their predictions — the continued absence of the runaway inflation they insisted was just around the corner — by stepping back and reconsidering both their model and their recommendations. But no. At best, we see a proliferation of new reasons to raise interest rates in a depressed economy, with nary an acknowledgment that previous predictions were dead wrong. At worst, we see conspiracy theories — we actually have double-digit inflation, but the BLS is spiriting the evidence away in its black helicopters and burying it in Area 51.

So at this point I thought I’d seen everything. But no: the prospect that Janet Yellen, a monetary dove, might become the next Fed chair has driven the right into a frenzy of — well, words fail me.

But the real objections coming out against Yellen are more, shall we say, primordial. Ezra Klein writes about The subtle, sexist whispering campaign against Janet Yellen. But after seeing this New York Sun editorial on The Female Dollar, I can’t say I see anything subtle. That’s about the most blatantly sexist thing I’ve read in a long time. I’m not going to quote the thing; just see for yourself.

Jonathan Chait writes

The Sun’s point — captured in its headline, “The Female Dollar?” — struck the Wall Street Journal’s editors as so clever as to bear repeating in their own editorial today. Yellen, the Journal concedes, “doesn’t lack for professional credentials. But her cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue because she’d be the first female Fed chairman.”

See how it works? It’s not the pigs pundits at the Sun who are sexist, but evil libruhls who support a woman for the position who are sexist. Because no matter how well qualified they are — and Cardiff Garcia, above, links to a Wall Street Journal analysis that says Yellen is very qualified, indeed — the only reason libruhls want women and minorities hired into important positions is that they are women and minorities, which is of course sexist and racist. So the only way to avoid sexism and racism is to hire only white men.