Issue of the week: Who should head the Fed?

So who will it be—Larry Summers or Janet Yellen? said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. The former Treasury secretary is pitted against the Fed’s current vice chairwoman as the White House’s top picks to replace Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve. “While people dismissed Summers’s chances a month or two ago,” many now say he’s the front-runner to become the world’s most important central banker. It helps that President Obama “really likes Summers,” and is surrounded by many of his friends from Wall Street. But Obama knows, too, that he’d be picking a fight by nominating Summers. “Republicans will make him answer for the stimulus and the bailouts, and progressive Democrats have a list of grievances going back to financial deregulation in the Clinton era.” And there’s the gender issue: Appointing Yellen would “break a significant glass ceiling” in an administration that “hasn’t always been great about appointing women.”

Yellen’s “gender should not in itself be enough qualification,” said Nicholas Wapshott in Reuters.com. “What we need above all is ingenuity,” and Summers has that in spades. The fact that he’s headstrong and confident “should commend him to those who believe the Fed has become obedient to the executive branch.” Summers has never been afraid to challenge the party line or think outside the box. Yellen is a “safe choice” who “will sail through the Senate.” But taking a gamble on Summers could pay off in a more original and independent monetary policy. He would face an uphill confirmation battle, but he’s already proved he can handle “the harsh limelight that comes with high office.”

Forget Summers, said Matthew O’Brien in TheAtlantic.com. He may be “a brilliant economist,” but Yellen’s still got better chops. “She’s spent much of the past 20 years at the Fed,” and was one of the first, in 2007, to see the risk of the looming credit crunch. Summers, by contrast, has “barely said anything about monetary policy,” and none of it has been encouraging: Some of his remarks suggest that he thinks quantitative easing’s dampening effect on interest rates could encourage companies to make bad investments. That view could put him in the camp of those who believe QE is leading to another bubble, when “the reality is QE has been a net positive.” Yellen would ignore the naysayers “and focus on jobs.”

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Neither one of them deserves the post, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In Yellen’s many years at the Fed, her default policy has been “to keep spiking the punch bowl,” promoting froth over real economic growth.And Summers—besides having been “run out of the Harvard presidency” for doubting women’s aptitude in science—was President Bill Clinton’s last Treasury secretary andwould surely “do whatever he thought necessary to help elect Hillary Clinton in 2016.” His vaunted ties to Wall Street do little for his credibility. We need a chairman committed to the Fed’s mission of maintaining price stability—and to ending its “post-crisis political interventions.” What we don’t need is an embarrassing brawl between two factions of the Democratic Party. “This political Big Top has everything—except a debate over what the Fed actually does.”