I used my travel time over the holidays to finally get through Paul Volcker’s memoirs, pushed to the top of my list by his passing. I suppose I’m happy for the window into how he positioned his career, but it affirms him as one of my longtime least-revered great influencers of the past 50 years.
Growing up as a country kid in the worst of the farm crisis, my family farm was collateral damage of his battle against inflation. I read his book looking for better understanding and condolence and found none.
His annoyance at Congress for formalizing the dual mandate of the Fed to manage unemployment as well as inflation… his distrust of econometrics… his willingness to label any alternative views or level of appropriate inflation as harmful or outright corrupt in its intent- down to saying one of the reasons he left Princeton was “the unfortunate modern practice of allowing students to rate their professors.” Throughout his career, there was no ability in him to humanize those in the real world or to consider the reality that everything on earth doesn’t fit neatly into little boxes and charts, and that sometimes one can be in need of others’ views.
There was an important role for discipline- for fighting corruption in the financial system and globally, and for that he was useful to the country; but he did his best work for the UN, the IMF and the World Bank where he was able to sort and investigate, but unable to subject the world to his myopic worldview unabated.
There’s a need for someone as he says, “to take the punchbowl away just as the party gets going,” but he didn’t need to revel in it so completely, and should have been more thoughtful – if only in hindsight- to the possibility that the economy could have recovered with less damage had he been able to see better down from his great tower.
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