Fed board seats remain unfilled

If Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a former chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, is offered the position, she may not want to return to Washington, where she would earn half as much as she does now, the Times reported Monday.

There are three vacancies on the board, the newspaper said.

Sources said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, prefer the positions be filled with academic economists. However, Geithner and Summers also recognize the need for members of the board to have first-hand experience with banking regulations and with Wall Street-sized deal-making.
"It would really be helpful if they had knowledge of the real economy," said William Sherrill, a former Fed governor who teaches at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

"All the attention lately has been on rescuing the financial sector from ruin, but the inability to move the stimulus over to the real economy -- and most directly, small businesses -- has been the problem," Bauer said.

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