I can only say your response is wholly inadequate. He agreed and sat quietly through panel after panel of financiers who worried that, in the wake of the crisis, increased regulation would squash financial innovation.įinally, Volcker erupted, arguing that he could think of no socially valuable financial innovation since the ATM. Shortly after the financial crisis, I invited Volcker to join a Wall Street Journal conference on the future of finance, held at a getaway south of London. And now at age 91, with his health declining, Volcker continues the good fight by promoting from his sick bed a new book: Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Governance, written with Christine Harper and published Tuesday by PublicAffairs. He became a leading crusader against global corruption-including the legal/lobbying kind practiced in Washington-and a tireless advocate of better-training for public servants as a path to better government. Once freed from the Fed, Volcker morphed into one of the world’s most blunt-spoken truth-tellers, describing the world exactly as he saw it. Only later did I fully appreciate that such obfuscation was tactical. He walked on, saying nothing.īut at the last minute, just before getting into his limousine, Volcker turned and began to speak.

At the end of his testimony, a scrum of reporters, myself included, chased him down the hallway, shouting questions at his head-which towered above us-about whether the Fed had intervened. On one occasion near the end of his second term, Volcker was testifying before Congress on a day when rumors were rife that the Fed had intervened in foreign exchange markets.

Volcker keeping at it