Donna Borak of CNN Money interviewed me early in February for her piece on outgoing Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.The piece is “Yellen’s historic legacy: Wise caution and a successful recovery,” CNN Money, February 3, 2018.

Here’s the one sentence she used, which is right at the end of the article:

“Time won’t tell,” said David Henderson, a research fellow with the Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “Those are accomplishments.”

That’s accurate. Ms. Borak had asked me more than once if I would say, in evaluating Yellen’s time in office, that “time would tell.” I sensed that she was looking for someone to say that. But I didn’t think that about her two major accomplishments: presiding over an economy without a recession and with low and falling unemployment and keeping inflation low and steady. So after she asked me again whether time would tell, I said that on those two issues, time won’t tell. We have the evidence.

By the way, one thing I think I said is that it’s technically incorrect, as I understand the terminology, to describe the growth of the economy during Yellen’s watch as a “recovery,” as the CNN title suggests. What I learned while working as a senior economist under Council of Economic Advisers chair Martin Feldstein is that once real GDP (we used real GNP back then) has reached its old level after a recession, the terminology switches from recovery to expansion. When Yellen came along, we were well into an expansion.