Fed's vice chair Janet Yellen reminds us how the 'painfully slow recovery' has afflicted workers

Chart shows the weak impact of stimulus spending on the
current recovery from recession compared with previous recoveries. Janet Yellen, who was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for a couple of years in President Bill Clinton's second term and is now vice chair of the Federal Reserve, has always leaned toward emphasizing the Fed's mission of maximum employment than its mission of controlling inflation. She was the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in 2009 when some of us hoped she might be nominated to replace Ben Bernanke as Fed chair.

Her speech Monday was not a spectacular departure from what she has said in the past. Nor did she break any new ground for those of us who have been following the progress of the economy since the Great Recession plunged us into post 1930s record-breaking territory on a number of fronts. Key among those has been how long it's taking for the unemployment rates (both narrowly and broadly determined) to return to anything that isn't ripping the skin off (and the guts out of) tens of millions of American workers.

But while the speech doesn't say anything particularly new, it's still good to hear from an official source, so join me below the fold and see what she had to say.