In her first public appearance as nominee to succeed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen faced the Senate Banking Committee, reiterating her intention to keep the monetary spigots wide open while rejecting the notion that we are seeing asset bubbles as a consequence of quantitative easing. Yellen noted there is “no set time” for tapering, implicitly admitted the Fed lost control of the market during the summer so-called taper tantrum, and agreed that investors buy gold to protect from “catastrophe.”