Paul Volcker – Interesting Recent FT Profile

Photo Source – D. Gorton/The New York Times

I’ve mentioned Paul Volcker more than a few times on this blog.

He is a legend and always has something interesting to say when he does talk.

I admire and respect a man that has lived his life with the goal of gaining respect, not riches.

In an age when Manhattan financiers own helicopters to escape the traffic on their weekend treks to the Hamptons, Paul Volcker embodies the customs of another time. The 80-year-old former chairman of the US Federal Reserve astonishes his hosts at New York dinner parties by asking where the nearest subway stop is.…

…hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros, calls him “the exemplary public servant – he embodies that old idea of civic virtue”.

This reputation, and Mr Volcker’s defining achievement as the banker who slayed the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s, lent a special weight to the speech he delivered this week about the country’s economic crisis. “The bright new financial system – for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards – has failed the test of the marketplace,” he told the Economic Club of New York. Despite all the noise of the volatile markets, the world listened…