> Link #2: Yellen gets asked why she doesn't raise rates all the time. Far from unwarranted certainty, she admits that she expected the economy to to better, doesn't know why it hasn't, and has therefore revised predictions of when the rates will be raised! Any consumer of financial news over the past 4 years should be familiar with this. The fact you omit this is highly disingenuous.
I agree with you, to some extent. Yellen is actually one of the more humble central bankers. Not much competition there, of course. But I would still classify what she says, and doubly so what she does, as unwarranted certainty.
The net effect of what she does, incidentally, is an unprecedented redistribution of wealth in the US economy (and elsewhere) from the poor to the rich. The fact that she does this things like this while being unsure about the consequences ...
And of course, she is like all other central bankers. As you say, she doubts whether what she's doing is the right thing. So what does this person do when she doubts the effects of her unprecedented policies ? Why, more of them, of course. She errs on the side of making the rich richer yet again and sabotaging the poor even more ...
Let's just be glad this woman is not a pilot.
My personal connection to this is that, like all central bankers, Yellen is effectively spending (sorry "loaning") my own money back to me, enriching a lot of people in the process. Needless to say, I feel less than ecstatic. And please don't make the central banker's argument (that it's to "save me from an economic crisis that didn't happen", ie. a counterfactual argument. It's about as realistic and useful as the quintessential example of such an argument "why didn't they just kill Hitler/Stalin/...")
And, yes, I understand why she can't be really humble.