If not Janet Yellen, who? Larry Summers wanted the job, but couldn’t win the support of leftish Democrats and feminists. Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who can have Ben Bernanke’s job as chairman of the Federal Reserve board for the asking, is said to have told the White House that he doesn’t want the post. Roger Ferguson, former vice chairman of the Fed, is mentioned as a possibility, but with the White House, the justice system, and the national security apparatus already headed by blacks, Ferguson’s appointment would run counter to President Obama’s drive for diversity. Former vice chairman Donald Kohn remains a possibility, but liberals say he was too close to Alan Greenspan. So the odds are that Obama will announce next week that he has pleased his feminist bloc, the left wing of his party, the markets that feast on low interest rates, and emerging economies fearful that high U.S. interest rates will cause a flight to the dollar, by nominating Yellen, now vice chair, for the post Bernanke will have held for eight years. The only opposition would come from Republican senators who fear that Yellen will continue to print money, eventually triggering inflation without making a significant dent in the unemployment rate, and some of Yellen’s Fed colleagues who share that conservative view.

Still, although the odds are that Yellen will get the nomination – she has been cancelling public speeches – that is not certain. The president is said to be so annoyed with senators in his party who shot down Summers, and with those Democrats who are, as he sees it, pre-empting his prerogatives by pressuring him to nominate Yellen, that he might by-pass their favorite candidate. A president who ceded his prerogatives to Congress in the recent Syrian fiasco now wants to reassert it when it comes to appointing a new Fed chairman.