News that President Obama intends to nominate Janet Yellen to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve sent us to see what we said about Ben Bernanke when, in October 2005, he was tapped to be the next chairman. “Mr. Bernanke is a cool customer,” we wrote. “[H]e is not likely to be quite the relationship builder that Chairman Greenspan was. That’s fine. A Fed with less personality and more predictability would spare us all some mortgage nightmares. America favors the rule of law over the rule of individual men. Let that doctrine hold for monetary policy as well.”

As it would turn out, the Federal Reserve under Mr. Bernanke was about the rule of men — and women. The Ph.D. standard is the phrase James Grant of the Interest Rate Observer likes to use. When Mr. Bernanke was put forward, the dollar was valued at a 495th of an ounce of gold. We hadn’t yet issued our editorial called “The Bush Dollar,” warning that the collapse of the greenback to below a 500th of an ounce of gold “is something Mr. Bush is going to have a hard time explaining to his grandchildren — not to mention the rest of us.”

Our editorial expressed the hope that Mr. Bernanke would pay attention to the gold price. In the event, Mr. Bernanke paid little attention to the price of gold. He was derisive toward the notion that any attention should be paid to the price of gold. When he was asked about it by Congressman Paul Ryan, Mr. Bernanke allowed that he didn’t “fully understand the movements in the price of gold” though he thought there was “a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now and some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge . . . .”

A cool customer indeed, and we’ll see in due course how Mrs. Yellen compares. We certainly wish her well. The hubbub that erupted over our editorial “The Female Dollar” obscured the fact that we made no endorsement, one way or another, between Mrs. Yellen and the other named contender, President Summers. She is famously focused on jobs as much as any other measure. But in our view there was little difference between Mrs. Yellen and Mr. Summers, in the sense that they are both partisans of a fiat money system that, in our opinion, must be reformed — by which we mean abandoned — before real progress will come.

It is hard to see Mrs. Yellen pushing for the kind of reconsideration of the Federal Reserve that we would like to see the Congress under-take as the central bank begins its second century. The initiative for that, if it is to come at all, is going to have to come from the Congress or from a president of America who thinks the way the founding presidents of America thought. Meantime we can’t help but note that Mrs. Yellen’s famous speech warning of a housing bubble, for which she gets much credit for being the first of the Fed governors to issue such a warning, was made in 2006 — well after the value of the dollar had plunged to below a 500th of an ounce of gold.