US jobs figures show Yellen has her work cut out for her
Optimistic Fed chairwoman has tough job ahead to keep US unemployment from derailing economy again
Some of the problems facing the world's biggest economy and the person about to take the second-biggest job running that economy were revealed in the US jobs report on Friday.
The unemployment rate dropped sharply to 6.7 per cent, but only 74,000 new non-farm jobs were created, the lowest number for three years and far fewer than economists expected.
Even making allowances for freakish factors at the turn of the year, the figures suggest that the situation facing the new chairwoman of the US Federal Reserve is more complex and potentially more worrying than all the economic wise men and women have imagined.
She defended … quantitative easing, which some critics claim has simply made the rich richer
Enter Janet Yellen, termed the "16 trillion dollar woman" by Time magazine, a reference to the size of the US economy, far bigger than still rapidly growing China, its nearest rival.
Yellen, the first woman to hold the job in the Fed's 100-year history, is something of a comparatively unknown known quantity.
She has been deputy to outgoing chairman Ben Bernanke for the past three years and before that was San Francisco Fed president but has largely kept out of the limelight.
Commentators predict that Yellen will be greatly concerned about employment, which is one of the two tasks enjoined on the Fed, the other being control of inflation
In her Time interview, Yellen was optimistic: "We'll see stronger growth this year". She was "hopeful that the first digit [of gross domestic product growth] could be 3 rather than 2 … The recovery has been frustratingly slow, but we're making progress in getting people back to work, and I anticipate that inflation will move back toward our longer-run goal of 2 per cent".