It makes headlines but is ultimately of no moment that Janet Yellen will, when confirmed, become the nation’s first female secretary of the treasury, just as she was the first female chair of the Federal Reserve. Women filling government’s top jobs is inching ever closer to becoming simply the norm.
What matters about Yellen — born and bred in Bay Ridge, Jewish daughter of a schoolteacher and doctor, valedictorian at Fort Hamilton High — is that she is a brilliant economist and public policy tactician, a believer in aggressive government intervention who knows how to move both fiscal and monetary levers to goose business expansion and job growth.
She will have to draw on that expertise immediately to help craft and champion robust stimulus measures that can get an economy walloped by a historically horrible pandemic, in which millions remain unemployed, back on solid footing.
