Janet Yellen

Biography

Janet Yellen was born in Brooklyn in 1946. She graduated in economics from Brown University in 1967 and earned a PhD at Yale in 1971, then taught at Harvard, worked as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Board and lectured at the London School of Economics. From 1980 she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is professor emerita; her research included efficiency-wage models developed with her husband, George Akerlof.

She served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997 and chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999. She was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, vice chair of the Federal Reserve from 2010, and from 2014 to 2018 the first woman to chair the Fed, which under her began raising interest rates in 2015.

In January 2021 she became the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, under President Biden. She pushed for a global minimum corporate tax, designed sanctions and an oil price cap against Russia, managed repeated debt-ceiling standoffs, and in 2023 approved the guarantee of all deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank. She left office in January 2025.