At the height of the 1998 Asian economic crisis, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan declared the U.S. was no “oasis of prosperity” in times of global stress. It is a lesson Ben S. Bernanke’s successor will need to heed upon inheriting a central bank once again facing a domestic need to think internationally.
For five years, the Fed has focused on home-grown challenges, including financial turmoil and the recession and surge in unemployment that resulted. The biggest threat to U.S. expansion under its next chairman may lie outside its borders as China and fellow emerging markets show signs of weakening.
Vice Chairman Janet Yellen is the top candidate to replace Bernanke if he steps down in January, and then would become the top monetary-policy maker as markets open wider for trade and finance and regulators seek more cross-border coordination in monitoring banks.
“The U.S. is becoming somewhat more dependent on what’s going on in the rest of the world,” said Nathan Sheets, the former head of the Fed’s international-finance division and now global head of international economics at Citigroup Inc. in New York. “For Fed policy makers, the U.S. is becoming much more closely integrated with the global economy.”
That shouldn’t prove a problem for Yellen. She has been globe trotting and crisis fighting at the Fed from Washington since 2010, helping to craft bond-buying and communication policies. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in the six previous years, she monitored Asia and oversaw banks with foreign exposure, including Wells Fargo & Co.
Global Meetings
Her Fed calendars, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act, show her attending meetings of counterparts and regulators in London, Paris, Zurich, Basel, Bern, Helsinki, Mexico City, Tokyo and Shanghai from 2011 to January of this year. In the 1970s, Yellen, now 67, worked in the Fed’s international division and also taught at the London School of Economics.
“I have known Janet for some years,” South African Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus said Aug. 13 in Johannesburg. “When Janet talks, you can hear a pin drop. She is methodical, analytical.”
The role of the Fed “has significant international implications,” said Clay Lowery, a vice president at Washington-based Rock Creek Global Advisors LLC and a former U.S. Treasury official. “Janet Yellen’s experience suggests a command of those issues.”
International Exposure