The Keys To Ben's Helicopter

Don't look now, but Helicopter Ben Bernanke's term as Fed Chairman is almost up.  Somebody's going to need to fly the thing without crashing it into a mountain. The White House has made it pretty clear that spending political capital on getting Ben another term in January isn't going to happen, so much so that the search for his successor is starting now, seven months ahead of time.

Wall Street Journal reporters Peter Nicholas and Jon Hilsenrath are reporting that the White House has "quietly begun assembling a short list of candidates" to take over as chairman of the Federal Reserve when current Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's term expires in January.

Earlier this month, President Obama said in an interview, "Well, I think Ben Bernanke's done an outstanding job. Ben Bernanke's a little bit like Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI - where he's already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to."

Yeah.  The smart money is on current Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen.

By every account, Yellen is a thoughtful and brilliant economist, which has allowed her to rise to where she is today.

"Ms. Yellen climbed the Fed ranks by being methodical rather than iconoclastic," writes Wall Street Journal reporter Jon Hilsenrath in a recent profile of the Fed vice-chairman. "She shows up at policy meetings with carefully crafted statements. Those who work with her say she arrives at the airport hours early."

"[Yellen] is very low-key, but impresses people quickly with the depth of her understanding and the sincerity of her views," said fellow Berkeley professor Andrew Rose in 1994, describing her as "collegial, persuasive and effective."

She has also worked with the academic elite of the economics sphere her entire career. Her mentor at Yale, where she received her Ph.D. in 1971, was Nobel-Prize winning economist James Tobin, whose legacy is enshrined in today's economics textbooks. After graduating from Yale, she taught at Harvard for five years. Then, she did a two-year stint (1976-1978) as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve, where she met her husband, fellow economist and future Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof.

After the Federal Reserve, Yellen was faculty at the London School of Economics for two years. Then, in 1980, she accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, where she stayed until her appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1994 by President Bill Clinton.

Having been kicking around the Fed for 20 years is a pretty big bullet point on the resume, admittedly.  Republicans on the other hand are going to extract their pound of flesh, since both they and the Paultards believe the Fed created the financial crisis by themselves (and the banks had nothing to do with it, which is like blaming the fire department for arsonists.)

We'll see.