The Forgotten Legacy of Paul Volcker
Paul Volcker has been a figure both hated and revered in equal measure throughout his tenure at the Federal Reserve. Nowadays, he is something of a distant figure, consigned to a now bygone era of late 70s’ stagflation and high interest rates. Occasionally Volcker’s comments on the current environment rise to the surface of financial news — one always hears them in his characteristic low drawl. But his prudent counsel often lays untouched, passed over without so much as a cursory, slightly wary glance.
Volcker is a representative of a dying attitude of fiscal responsibility, increasingly rare in today’s environment. As a (previous) member of the public sector, he is an endangered species in this respect. Volcker approached his station as Fed chief with an admirable sense of public duty and he persisted in his mission of proper monetary policy with a whole lot of backbone and moral fiber. Volcker is not quite cut from the same cloth as all the others, one could say, if his formidable integrity and ideological consistency are any indication.
The distillation of Volcker’s legacy into a single, overarching idea might read something like the following: stability for the American people is paramount. For it was, after all, the American people that Volcker most cared about. It is tremendously easy for Fed officials to bend to the pressing wishes of the political…
