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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

If Yellen wanted to sell out, she would have worked in industry. Janet Yellen had the job of leading the most important bank in the world, yet her salary was that of an third-year at Citdadel. At the end of the day, a couple hundred thousands of dollars for a talk is nothing for Citadel. Companies will often spend more than that for private concerts.

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I'm failing to understand how this excuses the bribe.

It's also possible that she's more valuable to Citadel in her current role. They might not want to remove her from it.

My point is that you don't dedicate their life to public service, just to purposefully get your former classmates in the private sector, who had always been magnitudes richer than you, even richer. If you did decide to change your mind, your speaking fees would be much more than a couple hundred thousand dollars.

I agree with that premise but not the conclusion.

No one gets into public service in order to enrich others, but one day people wake up and find themselves open to a little bit of corruption.

Exactly this. Bill Clinton's life goal wasn't to use the Presidency as a stepping stone to wealth. He just wanted to be President, and would probably still be running if there weren't term limits. But once you enter the government, you suddenly realize that people are willing to throw large sums of money at you to become "friends". Even if politicians don't start out corrupt, corruption is hard to avoid while in office.

Do you have any evidence or is this pure speculation? There are fewer treasury securities and fed chairs than there are CEOs of major financial institution. If they were really bribed, I'd expect the bribes to be much bigger.

> If Yellen wanted to sell out, she would have worked in industry

What do you think Yellen is going to do 4-8 years from now?

Retire, possibly get a boardship or hot the speaking circuit again. She'll be eighty, she's not going to get an industry position.

I would consider the speaking circuit to be an industry position. A very lucrative one.

The comment you replied to presented an industry position as the alternative to what she was doing, speaking. So if you're going to reframe those as equivalent, you should have stated that originally.

Would sitting on one or more boards not be an option for Hellen and would those not be industry positions?

I don't really consider a boardship an industry position.

Like, you have executives at some companies serving on boardships in unrelated industries. They aren't working two jobs.

She left a top position at the Fed several years ago. If she didn't go into the private sector after that, it's unlikely that she has any desire to do so, ever.

She did go into the private sector. How are these paid speaking engagements not private sector?

She didn't take a job as a managing director where she actually has decision making power. That's what people mean by going into the private sector.

What she did was give glorified TED Talks to a group. It's a performance.

> What she did was give glorified TED Talks to a group. It's a performance.

Even more reason to think that it's "selling out" and not "real" work.

Janet Yellen is 74. I would expect that she would retire or do what she has done, teach or research. She was at the Brookings Institution after being Chairman of the Fed. I suppose she could have been a senior VP at Goldman Sachs if she had wanted to be, but apparently she didn't.

For now she accepts a low salary. Other federal Bank employees have left for generous jobs at Citadel like Ben Bernanke

She's already served as the chair of the Federal Reserve, so she could be working a cushy job right now. And, being 74 years old, she likely won't have many more working years left to offset taking a low salary now.

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