She’s about to become one of the most influential financial leaders in the world, but a classmate who sat in front of Janet Yellen at Brooklyn’s Ft. Hamilton HS says he was “shocked” at her career path.
“I didn’t think she had a passion for economics,” recalled Ron Vincent, a former Wall Street guy who took the same economics class as the incoming Federal Reserve Bank chair and who now heads Hi Investors Capital.
“I was shocked. She was in the psychology club.”
Now, he added in awe, “She’s going to be the world’s most powerful woman.”
Not that Yellen, 67, was a slouch in high school. Vincent recalled her as inquisitive and brainy.
“Even when she walked the halls she was deep in thought. You knew she would be successful,” he said.
She graduated in 1963 as class valedictorian.
Yellen’s yearbook entry shows she was editor of the school paper, The Pilot, as well as a member of the Arista honor society, the Boosters basketball program, the Minutemen history club and that psychology club that still sticks in Vincent’s mind.
Her school photo depicts a serious young woman with a demure bob hairdo and intense eyes.
As head of the Fed, Yellen will help guide US monetary policies, affecting the pocketbooks of Americans and consumers across the globe.
Yellen’s four-year term begins Feb. 1. President Obama nominated her to the post in October.
In 2004, she became president of the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco and has been credited with recognizing the subprime-mortgage crisis earlier than other economists. She is currently the Fed’s vice chair.