Paul Krugman: 2009 And All That

There has been a lot of commentary on Neil Irwin’s report on why the White House doesn’t want Janet Yellen to chair the Fed, with good reason. The merits of Yellen versus Summers aside, it sounds as if the WH wants Summers, and doesn’t want Yellen, for all the wrong reasons. They want a team player — and consider Yellen’s somewhat independent stance as a liability, even though she has been consistently right. They consider Yellen diminished because she wasn’t part of the team making policy in 2009 — when most people outside the WH don’t consider 2009 anything like a policy triumph.