Yellen an unknown to 3 out of 4 Americans

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen has been on the job for eight months, but remains a largely unknown figure to the American public.

Just 24 percent of Americans identified Yellen as the head of the U.S. central bank in a recent news quiz from the Pew Research Center. The first woman to head the Fed came in just slightly ahead of Alan Greenspan, who chaired the institution from 1987 to 2006. Seventeen percent of those who took the survey picked him from the four choices available.

{mosads}Yellen is far from a household name, despite being a long-time presence at the Fed. She joined the central bank in 2004 as head of the San Francisco Fed, and became the Fed’s vice chairwoman in 2010. Yellen then succeeded Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke when he stepped down from the post earlier this year.

A pair of Supreme Court Justices — John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor — were wrongly named Fed chief by five and six percent of responders, respectively. And 48 percent did not even hazard a guess as to who is pulling the levers on the nation’s monetary policy.

Pew said that of the 12 questions on the survey, just two more rated more difficult than picking Yellen — nailing the amount of Americans at or below the poverty line (15 percent), and identifying what program consumes the most government dollars (Social Security).

The Fed itself is trying to make its presence less noteworthy. The central bank is in the process of ending its bond-buying stimulus program, and is turning its eyes towards potentially raising rates for the first time since the financial collapse in 2008.

Pew found that the difference in education made a big difference when it came to knowing who Yellen was. Forty-five percent of college graduates could identify the Fed chairwoman, compared with just 12 percent of Americans with a high school degree or less.

Not knowing who runs the Fed might be commonplace, but there does not appear to be any partisan breakdown behind that ignorance. Twenty-seven percent of respondents who identify as Republican correctly identified Yellen, compared with 26 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents.