Selection of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary Lifts Stocks: Live Business Updates

Janet Yellen knows Wall Street, and Wall Street knows Janet Yellen.

Ms. Yellen spent nearly 20 years at the Federal Reserve, including when the central bank turned to array of unconventional policies, like its bond-buying program known as quantitative easing, in the wake of the financial crisis and the great recession.

And she was chair of the central bank for four years as it very slowly withdrew that support — caution that has come to be seen as helping to lay the foundation of a strong labor market that pushed the unemployment rate to a 50-year low before the coronavirus pandemic derailed the economy.

Now, as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s pick for Treasury secretary, she’s being received by economists as someone who will favor giving the government a big role in addressing the economic damage wrought by the pandemic.

“While the pandemic is still seriously affecting the economy, we need to continue extraordinary fiscal support,” Ms. Yellen said in a Bloomberg Television interview in October.

In the immediate future, that could mean revamping programs meant to help businesses, municipalities and financial markets weather the pandemic — ones that Steven Mnuchin, the current secretary, is allowing to end.

Ms. Yellen, 74, has made a case that Congress should consider giving the central bank the power to buy a broader array of assets, like corporate bonds or even stocks — a response that progressives have at times painted as pro-corporate. Investors may see it as a sign that she is likely to be an activist policymaker.

But she also might favor slightly tighter financial regulation, given her recent track record as a critic of Trump-era rollbacks of constraints on banks.

Here’s what people had to say about the news of her likely appointment:

• “She believes it is essential to continue fiscal as well as monetary support for the economy and will likely seek to leverage her credibility with Congress over time to promote more fiscal support including for the unemployed and for state and local governments — though she will be careful ahead of confirmation and is not someone who has much experience of political deal-making.” — Krishna Guha and Ernie Tedeschi, economists at Evercore ISI.

• “Yellen will likely work well with Fed Chairman Jay Powell. Powell was a Fed governor when Yellen was chair. And while they may have some small disagreements, they are on the same page regarding the need for economic stimulus. Yellen’s experience as Fed chair should also be comforting to markets, since she knows how the Fed works and won’t undermine it.” — Ian Katz, financial policy analyst at Capital Alpha Partners.

• Ms. Yellen “will have a tough job ahead of her, but she has the experience, talent, credibility and relationships with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to make a real difference.” — Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.

• “Janet Yellen would be an outstanding choice for Treasury Secretary. She is smart, tough, and principled. As one of the most successful Fed Chairs ever, she has stood up to Wall Street banks, including holding Wells Fargo accountable for cheating working families.” — Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

• “Janet Yellen will be the kind of deeply thoughtful, caring leader our country needs as Treasury Secretary. She understands that a high pressure economy where workers are in short supply is the best social program. Janet recognizes that absorbing private saving is now a central economic problem for our country and the world. This will be crucial for effective policymaking.” — Lawrence Summers, Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton.

Retailers are succumbing to the dominance of e-commerce and scrambling to salvage increasingly irrelevant physical shopping spaces by turning them into fulfillment centers to process online orders and returns, rather than stores where customers can browse and shop.

The forces propelling online shopping were set in motion long before the pandemic. But in the future, 2020 will be seen as a major inflection point for retail, The New York Times’s Michael Corkery and Sapna Maheshwari report:

• Across the industry, online sales are expected to increase at their fastest rate in 12 years, accounting for 20 percent of all retail purchases this year. That’s up from 16 percent in 2019, according to Forrester Research.

• Earlier this month, the number of stores announced for closure in 2020 climbed to a high of 10,991, according to the CoStar Group, a data provider for the real estate industry. Many malls are teetering as tenants reduce the number of stores, fail to pay rent or exit through bankruptcies.

• Across Manhattan, the number of retail leases signed or renewed dropped 31 percent in the third quarter from a year ago and rents fell 13 percent in the major shopping corridors, according to CBRE, a real estate services company.

• But warehouse leases were up 70 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter, and more than a dozen e-commerce warehouses are being built to feed New York’s insatiable need for same-day deliveries.

• In June, Amazon signed a lease on a 285,000-square foot “delivery station” in the Maspeth section of Queens. Amazon has also vastly expanded the space it is leasing in a string of giant warehouses on Staten Island. In addition to the 855,000-square foot fulfillment center that the company opened in 2018, Amazon this fall expanded into 1.4 million additional square feet of space on the Staten Island site. In the Bronx, the company is taking over a building recently vacated by its rival Walmart.

As Inauguration Day approaches, President Trump’s grip on the collective psyche of investors appears to be receding.

Investors of all political persuasions say they are ready to turn the page on what was a profitable but extraordinarily politicized and stressful period for the financial markets, where they had to contend with an unpredictable force whose pronouncements frequently moved stock prices, The New York Times’s Matt Phillips reports.

The president’s trumpeting of market records, hectoring of executive whose decisions he disagreed with and surprise policy announcements via Twitter stood in stark contrast to the behavior of past presidents.

Since taking office, he has sent tweets or retweets with stock market references more than 200 times, and made scores of statements spotlighting the market’s rise under his administration.

Mr. Trump has disclosed market-moving information after private discussions with executives, he has demanded that the Fed cut interest rates to prop up the market, and he has unveiled his changing positions in the trade war with China in a hail of unexpected tweets that sent share prices tumbling.

He has publicly threatened and castigated major American companies, facing off with Amazon.com over its tax payments and deals with the U.S. Postal Service; with General Motors, Ford and Carrier — then a subsidiary of United Technologies — over plans to shutter plants; and with Lockheed Martin and Boeing over the costs of fighter jets and replacements for Air Force One.

For some investors, it means @realDonaldTrump has become an unwelcome distraction that they’re looking forward to being able to ignore soon.

“I just want my life to go back to normal,” said Barry Ritholtz, a money manager in New York who did not vote for Mr. Trump. “I just want the noise level to quiet down.”