Janet Yellen, after being nominated Wednesday by U.S. President Barack Obama to head the Federal Reserve, spoke of the dual role of the Federal Reserve to help ensure “the opportunity to work hard” while keeping inflation in check. She will face some formidable tasks if she is to take the position.

    THE challenges for Janet Yellen if she becomes the next Federal Reserve chair will require both the steely intellect and the personable style that many attribute to her.

    After being nominated for the job by President Obama on Wednesday, the longtime Fed official spoke briefly, and framed the Fed’s job in positive terms.

    “We can help ensure that everyone has the opportunity to work hard and build a better life. We can help make sure that inflation remains in check. We can and must safeguard the financial system,” said Yellen, the Fed’s current vice chair. “We have made progress…. We have farther to go.”

    She said that despite the economic recovery since 2009, “too many Americans still can’t find a job, and worry how they’ll pay their bills.” She punctuated that point by adding that: “The mandate of the Federal Reserve is to serve all the American people.”

    The president, in making the nomination, also emphasized the balancing act ahead, and his confidence that Yellen has the right outlook for the job.

    “American workers and their families will have a champion in Janet Yellen,” Obama said.

    He said she’s tough but knows how to listen to competing views and build consensus — a vital skill in a position where power hinges on keeping the members of a 12-person policy committee mostly on the same page.

    Yellen’s nomination is still subject to scrutiny by the U.S. Senate. If confirmed, she would succeed Ben Bernanke, who will depart in January at the end of two four-year terms in the post.

    A close ally of the chairman, Yellen has been a key architect of the Fed’s efforts under Bernanke to keep interest rates near record lows to support the economy, and she likely would continue steering Fed policy in the same direction as Bernanke.

    Yellen is widely seen as a “dove” on Fed policy: She stresses the need to use the Fed’s tools to boost growth and reduce unemployment in the sluggish aftermath of the Great Recession, rather than worry about igniting future inflation.

    In part for that reason, she’s been outspokenly backed by many Democrats in Congress and opposed by some Republicans.

    Brian Gardner, Washington political analyst for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, predicted that Yellen, widely respected as an academic economist and veteran policymaker, will be easily confirmed despite some Republican no votes.

    Markets will be looking to Yellen for clearer communication about where Fed policy is heading, after the central bank’s failure to roll back stimulus at its September meeting caught many investors on the back foot.

    At her first policy meeting as the Fed’s No. 2 official, Bernanke tapped Yellen to lead a push to fine-tune the central bank’s communications to ensure its policy messages got through.

    It was not her first such assignment: In 2007, she helped revamp the Fed’s economic forecasts, making them a more frequent quarterly affair and extending their horizon to three years to improve their usefulness as guideposts on the likely policy path.

    In late 2012, Yellen helped push the Fed’s guidance even further by backing a controversial idea to tie interest rates to certain economic thresholds. Specifically, the Fed vowed to hold rates near zero at least until the jobless rate fell to 6.5 percent as long as inflation did not exceed 2.5 percent.

    With the labor market in slow-motion recovery, one of Yellen’s most critical and delicate tasks will be to guide the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee as it tries to wean markets off the Fed’s bond-buying stimulus.

    “I think I am as committed to price stability and the attainment of price stability as any member of the FOMC,” she said in March 2010. “When the time has come, am I going to support raising interest rates? You bet. I don’t want to see inflation pick up.”

    Yellen would also take over the Fed at a delicate time for China, the world’s No. 2 economy after the United States, and other developing nations.

    The International Monetary Fund, citing slower growth in China, India and Brazil, this week reduced its forecast for global economic growth to 2.9 percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2014. Both are 0.2 percentage point weaker than the IMF’s previous forecast in July.

    Investors have been pulling money out of developing markets, partly to take advantage of rising interest rates in the U.S. The Fed might be called upon to help calm worldwide financial volatility.

    “The role of the Fed chair is so critical,” says Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com. “We’re not just talking about the U.S. economy. We’re talking about the global economy.”

    Yellen will also have to establish herself as chair at a time when the Fed is experiencing unusual turnover. When Bernanke leaves Jan. 31, there could be up to four vacancies that Obama would need to fill on the seven-member Fed board.

    Yellen, who earned her doctorate in economics from Yale, is the daughter of a Brooklyn doctor who saw patients in the family home.

    Charles Saydah, a retired journalist who went to junior high and Fort Hamilton High School with Yellen, said she was “a self-described nerd, nose to the grindstone.”

    “We referred to her as a stealth intellect,” said Saydah. “She only called attention to herself when we compared marks — she always got the highest marks.”

    Yellen decided to pursue a career in economics after hearing Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin speak and being impressed by his combination of academic accomplishment and public service.

    Her notes of Tobin’s lectures were so exhaustive that students passed them around as study guides.

    That thoroughness has stayed. Yellen arrives at Fed meetings with carefully researched written remarks, delivering them in measured tones with a slight, somewhat nasal Brooklyn accent that nearly 30 years in California did not fully eradicate.

    Yellen’s experience in policymaking is as solid as her career in academia, which included teaching at Harvard University and the London School of Economics as well as the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

    She had two stints as a Fed policymaker before becoming vice chair, as a board member and as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and headed former president Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers for 2-1/2 years.

    Yellen has written extensively about monetary policy, but she has also struck farther afield. One paper, written with her Nobel Prize-winning economist husband George Akerlof, analyzed single motherhood, arguing that a rise in out-of-wedlock births was due to a decline in “shotgun” weddings. That paper proposed forcing unwed fathers to pay child support.

    Yellen met Akerlof when they were both at the Fed in Washington. Their only child — Robert Akerlof — teaches economics at the University of Warwick.

    Yellen, whose love of gourmet food does not stop her frequenting the Fed’s staff cafeteria, joked in 1995 that dinner at her house meant “a diet that is richer in discussions of economics and policy issues than many people would find appetizing.”(SD-Agencies)