Paul A. Volcker, who helped shape American economic policy for more than six decades, and who will forever be etched in the history books for leading the Federal Reserve’s brute-force campaign to subdue inflation in the late 1970s and early ’80s, has died on Sunday in New York, the NYT reported. He was 92.
Volcker, a literally towering, he was known as “Tall Paul” at 6 foot 7 inches, “taciturn and somewhat rumpled figure”, arrived in Washington as America’s postwar economic hegemony was beginning to crumble. He would devote his professional life to wrestling with the consequences, the NYT writes in its obit of the last US central banker to do the right thing.
Paul Volcker was the last of the great US central bankers. He was followed by such intellectual midgets as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke who unleashed the now infamous cycle of Fed-inspired booms and busts, the outcome of which will have devastating consequences for the US economy and the world.
In recent years, Volcker was instrument in crafting the “Volcker Rule” which prohibited banks from engaging in prop trading, which however banks promptly circumvented by pretending that prop trading was, in fact, hedging.
More from the NYT below:
As a Treasury Department official under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Volcker waged a long, losing struggle to preserve the postwar international monetary system established by the Bretton Woods agreement.
As a senior Federal Reserve official from 1975 to 1987, in addition to battling inflation, he sought to limit the easing of financial regulation and warned that the rapid growth of the federal debt threatened the nation’s economic health.
In his last official post, as chairman of President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, formed in response to the 2008 financial crisis, he persuaded lawmakers to impose new restrictions on big banks — a measure known as the “Volcker Rule.”
Mr. Volcker interlaced his long stretches of public service with a lucrative career on Wall Street, most prominently as chief executive of the investment bank Wolfensohn & Company.
His reputation for austere integrity also made him a popular choice as an independent arbiter. In one instance he oversaw the reclamation of deposits that Swiss banks had failed to return to the families of Holocaust victims.
His defining achievement, however, was his success in ending an extended period of high inflation after President Jimmy Carter chose him to be the Fed’s chairman in 1979.
He prevailed by delivering shock therapy, driving the economy into a deep recession to persuade Americans to abandon their entrenched expectation that prices would keep rising rapidly.
The cost was steep. As consumers stopped buying homes and cars, millions of workers lost their jobs. Angry homebuilders mailed chunks of two-by-fours to the Fed’s marble headquarters in Washington. But Mr. Volcker managed to wring most inflation from the economy.
And here is a great excerpt from a recent interview Volcker conducted with Barron’s:
I was a great defender of Bretton Woods. I thought it could be reformed, and I discovered it couldn’t be, partly for immediate political reasons. But you can’t maintain a fixed-exchange-rate system and commonality without a very strong hegemon. Brits were that before World War I when they had the gold standard; they lost it in the ’20s and ’30s, and things were a mess. We had it after World War II for 20 years or so. But even back in the ’70s, it began. We could not negotiate an agreement, which I was hopeful about, but in hindsight I think was an impossible venture because we were no longer strong enough to, in relative terms.
What the French were really worried about in the ’70s, when that phrase “exorbitant privilege” originated, we had a current-account deficit and we were buying up French industry. And they didn’t want us buying up French industry. But we sat here for 20 years running deficits, because it was so easy for us to finance these big deficits. I once coined a phrase that nobody picked up: Exorbitant privilege is also an invitation or temptation to lack discipline. Someday, that might come back and bite us. It hasn’t yet.
Read the entire interview here.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Great Fed Chairman. Gentile. Coincidence? You be the judge.
He was 92. Doubt this is a nefarious death.
The money quote:
“Someday, that might come back and bite us. It hasn’t yet.”
Someday is here.
If you enter this search —> “was paul volcker good for america”
— CNBC says, “Paul A. Volcker was a giant among American public servants…”
— The NY Times says, “Volcker was very good on monetary policy”
— NPR says, Volcker “was the closest thing to a rock star economist as this country has seen”
And on and on and on. I expect Volcker to be canonized as a Catholic saint by this Saturday.
I don’t know jack shit about Volcker … which is why I did a search. I just wonder if all these libtard sources think he’s so wonderful … was he really that wonderful?
Wait. What???
Hiya Stuck.
Volcker did not defeat anything…
“He was followed by such intellectual midgets as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke who unleashed the now infamous cycle of Fed-inspired booms and busts, the outcome of which will have devastating consequences for the US economy and the world.”
Wonder If Greenspan & Bernanke reached for the Tums after reading that line.
If Tall Paul caused mayhem to many as Fed Chair, opposite of what Greenie and Benji did, it seems neither method of Fed intervention satisfies all parties.
Meddling. Pshaw.
End the Fed.
By allowing/raising interest rates to record high levels, he encouraged massive amounts of savings, deterred reckless malinvestment in unsustainable projects, and put plenty of deferred spending dollars in “safe” storage to fuel the boom years of the 1980s. I had a CD that was getting 12.5% back then. Central banks are the greatest criminal organizations on the planet, but he did actually do a bit of good at a time when the economy was out of control following Nixon’s criminal severing of the final vestiges of the “gold standard.”
His doctor warned him smoking would kill him, but he wouldn’t listen.
Volker was a friend of the Rockerfellers who got him to loosen the money supply . He was more interested in protecting the value of the dollar than helping out the actual economy.
Volcker and others were indifferent to during his time at the Fed to people’s suffering during the terrible recession that he extended to some degree .Volcker eventually does control inflation, but not before causing a nasty recession that inflicted pains on borrowers (lower and middle classes, consumers, small businesses) to the benefit of lenders most notably his pals the Rockerfellers and other high net worth folks .
Like all heads of the Fed he listens to his masters the Rockerfleers and Rothchilds not to the government or the people .
inflation hurts the little guy far more than it does the big shot–
“Paul Volcker, Central Banker Who Defeated Inflation, Dead At 92”
Paul Volcker and the privately-owned Fed created by banksters in violation of the US Constitution also caused the inflation he takes credit for defeating by creating trillions of unearned and therefore counterfeit dollars out of nothing. Central and fractional reserve banking is the greatest system of theft and plunder ever devised by “mankind” because it debases the currency, reduces the purchasing power of dollars, and therefore steals from honest workers and producers of valuable products and services. The diabolical and unconstitutional Fed should be bulldozed to the ground, all the chairmen and officials of the Fed indicted for massive theft and corruption, and former dead chairmen such as Volcker exposed for the gangsters they were.
OMG!