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Paul Volcker
Paul Adolph Volcker, Jr. (September 5, 1927 – December 8, 2019) was an American economist. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987.
Quotes
- Mehrling: So you didn’t read at that time the classic banking texts, for example, Bagehot’s Lombard Street?
Volcker: Well I read some of Bagehot, and I read a lot of Hawtrey. I remember I read a lot of Hawtrey.
Mehrling: Currency and Credit? The Art of Central Banking?
Volcker: I don’t remember the names of the books, just being in London. In those days I used to read The Economist and the Financial Times, so I kept up with what was going on in the money markets.- Paul Volcker interviewed by Perry Mehrling (April 18, 2000) in Inside the economist’s mind: conversations with eminent economists (2007) edited by Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett.
- “The American standard of living must decline”; as Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan, October 1979. archive.is, New York Times, David McNally, "Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance", books.google.com.
The political economy of the dollar
- Fred Hirsch's last dicta: "A controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980's"… The phrase captures what seems to me the prevailing attitudes and practices of most governments in this decade.
- We live in a world in which individuals and businessmen… they want to do so unencumbered by national boundaries. At the same time, modern democracies, at least as much as other forms of government, long for autonomy; they want to control their own destinies in ways responsive to the needs of an electorate often concerned less with national than with local or sectorial interests. Yet, theory and experience indicate we can’t have it both ways, full integration and full autonomy.
- The happy days of Bretton Woods, often viewed today with nostalgia, were a special case, workable because of a particular economic and political setting… the inherent contradictions in the system were too great. With the benefit of hindsight, it would seem that an erosion of the United States competitive position was implicit in the postwar arrangements.
- I start from the premise that the underlying pressures toward integration and interdependence are growing stronger, not weaker. We cannot reverse or stop the advancing technology that brings us fast and cheap communication and transportation, or the spread of knowledge.
- There does seem to me a latent danger— no part of the intention of present European leaders— implicit in the development [of the euro]. Regional monetary unity implies a greater degree of visible loss of autonomy for member countries; yet national econom ic problems will remain. The temptation could arise to solve some of these regional adjustment problems within Europe by direct subsidies to producers, by protection against the outside world, or by other means damaging to the trading opportunities of others.
Quotes about Volcker
- Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker essentially eliminated M1 as a target indicator. His successor, Alan Greenspan, eliminated M2. On the other hand, in the past year or two, Greenspan has said on various occasions that maybe we should reconsider using M2. The trouble is that all these measures of money cannot be relied on because the velocity of money changes. It is quite unstable.
- Lawrence Klein, "Keynsianism Again: Interview with Lawrence Klein", Challenge (May-June 2001)
External links
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