Volcker

April 30, 2012
This admiring biography leaves no doubt about Silber’s view that the world owes Paul Volcker a great debt. As Federal Reserve Board chairman from 1979 to 1987, “Volcker did nothing less than restore the reputation of an American financial system on the verge of collapse.” Silber (When Washington Shut Down Wall Street), a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, spent hundreds of hours interviewing his subject and ably charts Volcker’s career, from his early years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury Department in the 1950s and 1960s to becoming undersecretary of the Treasury under Nixon. In the early 1970s, Volcker oversaw the precarious shift from a dollar backed by the gold standard to a currency by fiat, which ushered in the era of floating currency exchange rates and launched the modern financial era. Though Silber lucidly explains this process, a prior understanding of economics would aid a casual reader. While it’s difficult to enliven some of this material, Silber gamely tries, and sometimes resorts to clunky sports analogies. It’s a measure of Volcker’s lasting influence that current financial reforms include a restriction on banks’ ability to engage in speculative trading, known as the Volcker Rule, a fitting third act for a lifelong government servant who “laid the foundation for restoring fiscal integrity in America.” Agent: Eric Lupfer, WME.

July 1, 2012
From a fellow economist, an admiring biography of Paul A. Volcker. Born in 1927, Volcker attended Princeton and eventually landed in the U.S. Treasury Department as an influential policymaker. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed him chairman of the Federal Reserve, making the imposing man the most visible banker anywhere; Ronald Reagan retained Volcker as chairman. In some respects, Silber (Finance and Economics/New York Univ., Stern School of Business; When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy, 2007, etc.) delivers a conventional chronological biography light on Volcker's personal life. The author focuses instead on three daring policy battles that changed the world economic order: removing the U.S. dollar from its link to the gold supply; using fresh fiscal policies to tamp down high inflation rates; and President Obama's involving the octogenarian Volcker in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Obama hoped, not entirely in vain, that the combination of Volcker's brilliant mind and untarnished reputation would lead to a more secure banking system through a combination of moral suasion, executive branch regulation and congressional legislation. While Silber is admiring, he provides copious evidence that Volcker is worthy of his credibility. Without Volcker in charge at certain intervals, he writes, the American financial system might have tipped from the verge of collapse into total meltdown. Although not the first biography of Volcker, Silber's book is the most up-to-date and blessedly free of jargon.

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April 15, 2012

As Federal Reserve chair, Paul A. Volcker helped curb booming inflation in the 1970s; as chair of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, he grappled with 2008's financial implosion. Accomplished author Silber is director of the Glucksman Institute for Research in Securities Markets at NYU's Stern School of Business and should be able to explain Volcker's accomplishments to the financially challenged.

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