Paul Volcker, Chair of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, speaks to colleagues during a lunch address at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University 6th Annual Conference on Emerging from the Financial Crisis Friday, Feb. 20, 2009, in New York. The conference hosted members of the private sector from around the world to share their views on the global economy. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
One of his big concerns was to change the expectations, and hence the actions, of people who believed prices would continue to rise rapidly.
“We are dealing with an inflationary momentum, and patterns of thinking and behavior, that have developed over decades,” Volcker told the National Press Club in September 1981. “Something like half the working population — those under age 35 — have never known price stability in their working experience. ... We have become accustomed to living with inflation, adjusting to it — and anticipating more. And as we have done so, we unwittingly set in motion forces that have kept it going.”
Within two years of the Fed’s peak interest rate, inflation fell below 3%, ending the period dubbed the Great Inflation.
Still, the high interest rates had their stifling effects. The economy plunged into recession. Before the 2007-09 bust, the 1981-82 recession had been the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate in 1982 hit 10.8% — more than 1 in 10 would-be workers — still the highest since 1940.
Volcker was vilified. A trade publication, the Tennessee Professional Builder, published a “wanted” poster of Volcker in early 1982 and accused him and the Fed of “premeditated and cold-blooded murder of millions of small businesses.”
“Without his bold change in monetary policy and his determination to stick with it through several painful years, the U.S. economy would have continued its downward spiral,” William Poole, former president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, wrote in a 2005 tribute. “By reversing the misguided policies of his predecessors, Volcker set the table for the long economic expansions of the 1980s and 1990s.”
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Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. was born in Cape May, New Jersey, on Sept. 5, 1927, and grew up in Teaneck, where his father was the manager of the leafy northern Jersey suburb. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1949, later received a master’s degree in political economy from Harvard and became an economist at the New York Federal Reserve in 1952. He went on to work at Chase Manhattan Bank and the Treasury Department, where he served as President Richard Nixon’s undersecretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs from 1969 to 1974.
With unemployment and inflation growing and demand for the dollar weakening, the economy was in crisis mode in 1971. Volcker was among the White House economic advisors, including Fed Chairman Arthur Burns and Treasury Secretary John Connally, who created the “Nixon shock” policies. First, they unilaterally canceled the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold — effectively ending the post-war Bretton Woods system of fixed currency exchange rates — and then imposed a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to check inflation, the first such non-wartime controls.
Volcker left the Treasury in 1974 and became a senior fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. Almost exactly a year after Nixon resigned as president in August 1974, Volcker returned to the central bank as president of the New York Fed, where he advocated monetary restraint.
Volcker’s concern about inflation had a lasting impact on the central bank. Monitoring rising prices is one of the Fed’s dual mandates, along with employment trends, in taking the pulse of the economy and setting interest rates.
After his inflation-busting days at the Fed, Volcker became chairman of the Wolfensohn & Co. investment firm. In 1996, he led a commission that investigated dormant Swiss bank accounts of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His work led to a settlement of $1.25 billion.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, he led Obama’s economic recovery board from 2009 to 2011. He was critical of financial institutions’ roles in bringing on the 2008 economic meltdown and called for limiting the size of the nation’s biggest banks. As such, he was instrumental in the creation of the Volcker rule, part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The rule sought to prevent commercial banks from using their own funds to invest in derivatives, hedge funds, and private-equity firms.
Volcker wrote nine books, including “Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government,” a memoir published in October 2018 — when he was 91.
“I had no intention of writing a book, but there was something that kind of was irritating me,” he told The New York Times columnist and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin at the time. “I’m really worried about this governance thing.”
Referring to the state of the nation, he added: “We’re in a hell of a mess in every direction.”
Survivors include his wife, Anke Dening, and two children from his first marriage to Barbara Bahnson, who died in 1998.
