Paul Volcker’s Guide to the Almighty Dollar
Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp. We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government —about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America. Keeping at It , written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in...
