Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen has been getting kudos from many corners of Wall Street for her deft handling of the central bank’s path to normalization after the harrowing period during the financial crisis when the august body took extraordinary measures to rescue the U.S. economy and prevent a domino-style collapse of the banking system.
But in an interview this week at a Wharton lecture series, her first public appearance outside Washington since stepping down last month, Yellen reflected on some of the missteps by the Fed as well as financial regulators around the globe for not foreseeing or preventing the 2008 crisis from unfolding. Some critics blamed former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s low interest rate policies for fueling the subprime housing collapse that led to the crisis.
