This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 25th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

The search for a new head of the Federal Reserve is a daunting task, but Fed Chairs weren't always

insiders with long experience in government.

Our Collaboria, Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute, evaluates a leading

candidate for Fed Chair, Janet Yellen.

Currently Janet Yellen is an economist who serves as the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

She's actually a long-time institutionalist with the Fed.

She started her career, 1977, as a staff economist at the Fed.

Before coming to the Federal Reserve Board in 2010,

she also served as the president of the San Francisco

Federal Reserve.

In between that time, she served as on the Council

of Economic Advisors under President Clinton and also was a long time

university professor before then.

So she is an economist, well thought of within the profession, certainly well within the quote it sort of new Keynesian

mainstream choosing a person to head the Federal Reserve just always seems like

an impossible task it's certainly it depends on one's objectives and of course there are competing objectives and you know also note it's a relatively modern phenomenon.

This actually started under Kennedy where he is CEA chair at the time Walter Heller

really decided that he wanted to reshape the Federal Reserve and push it in a

more academic and of course during that time academic was sort of synonymous with Keynesian.

Prior to Kennedy most of the Federal Reserve not only chair and board members

were bankers or local you know industrialists you

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