Federal Reserve Chief Janet Yellen Says Banks Are Safer Now: Here’s Why

The state of the state of banking in America? It’s on safer ground, according to Janet Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed).

The reasons behind this are complicated, but the short version is that many of the nation’s top banks had gotten involved buying and selling risky mortgage loans. That ballooned into what Yellen called a “tidal wave” of bad debt that plunged the economy into the worst crisis it had seen since the Great Depression, starting around 2008. This most recent crisis was known as The Great Recession.