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Here’s How Much Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Is Worth - Forbes

The former Fed chair earned more than $7 million giving speeches to big banks and other businesses before becoming treasury secretary.

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It no longer takes hundreds of millions to be one of the wealthiest people in the president’s cabinet. Just ask Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is worth an estimated $20 million—a sum that would have qualified as merely well-off on Trump’s team but looks downright rich among Biden’s bunch.

Unlike Trump’s tycoons—Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin—Yellen is neither a billionaire heiress nor a self-made centimillionaire. Instead, the 74-year-old built up her small fortune over time, through years in academia and government, cashing in most clearly after she left her position as Fed chair in 2018 and started giving speeches in corporate America.

Born in Brooklyn, the daughter of an elementary school teacher and a doctor, Yellen took an early interest in math, which she figured she would study upon entering college at Brown. Once classes started, however, she became smitten with economics, a field that would allow her to use numbers to help people. “After my first economics course, that was kind of love at first sight,” Yellen explained in a 2018 discussion at the Brookings Institution.

She headed to Yale for her doctorate, studying under left-leaning economist James Tobin, who had served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Kennedy Administration. Following in his mold, Yellen would later bounce back and forth between government and academia. Early in her career, she taught at Harvard, but in in 1976, she went to work as an economist at the Federal Reserve.


Yellen Vs. Mnuchin

Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was an estimated 20 times richer than Yellen.


It was there that she met her husband, another economist, named George Akerlof, in the Fed cafeteria. Together they purchased a home in Berkeley, California, in 1979, and both eventually became professors in the economics department at the University of California at Berkeley. There wasn’t much separation between their work and personal lives. Together, Akerlof and Yellen studied wages, concluding that it made sense that some companies paid workers more than the market demanded. Akerlof eventually teamed up with two other economists to win the Nobel Prize in 2001.

Meanwhile, Yellen had returned to Washington, where she joined the Clinton Administration and became chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the same group her professor had been a part of in the Kennedy era. She ultimately ended up going back to northern California, where she served as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve from 2004–10. In that position, Yellen sounded the alarm on early indicators of a housing bubble.

In 2010, with the Great Recession continuing to weigh on the economy, she became vice chair of the Federal Reserve. She took over as chair in 2014. Bankers in that position often serve multiple terms across administrations of both parties, and Yellen made it clear she was interested in doing just that. But President Trump nominated Jerome Powell instead.


Inside Yellen’s Fortune

The treasury secretary owns multimillion-dollar homes in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, California, but the majority of her fortune appears to sit in more liquid assets such as diversified mutual funds.



It was a disappointment to Yellen, but from a financial perspective, it was also an opportunity. In February 2018, the month that Powell replaced her as Fed chair, Yellen signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, an agency that works with many former officials. It’s unclear exactly how much money she made giving speeches in 2018, but if her earnings over the next two years are any indication, it was probably plenty.

In 2019, Yellen took in about $5 million from speaking, according to a financial disclosure report she submitted to federal ethics officials. The money kept coming in 2020, adding another $2.2 million or so. The businesses willing to pay her to speak were largely the sorts of companies you might expect: big financial firms whose businesses overlapped with both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Citibank paid Yellen almost $1 million. Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge fund, shelled out more than $800,000. Credit Suisse, City National Bank and Standard Chartered Bank each paid Yellen at least $300,000. A spokesperson for the treasury secretary declined to comment on her personal finances.

In 2019, Yellen and Akerlof picked up a $2.1 million home in Washington, D.C. No surprise—they didn’t need a mortgage. They also still own the same Berkeley house they purchased in 1979. Today it’s worth an estimated $2.2 million.

By the end of 2020, the power-couple economists owned a diverse portfolio of assets. In addition to their $4.3 million in real estate, they had millions of dollars invested in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, millions more in bond funds and at least $1.1 million sitting in cash accounts. They also held a handful of modestly sized interests, typically less than $100,000, in blue-chip companies like DuPont, Phillips 66, Norfolk Southern, Raytheon and Pfizer. Yellen divested those in February. She seems to have hung on to her most unusual investment, however—a stamp collection worth more than $15,000.  

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Here’s How Much Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Is Worth - Forbes
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