YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Volcker

lines on the record: 26
first: 2018-11-26
most recent: 2018-11-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then, in terms of the attacks on things like the Fed, obviously You know, that disturbs him, but he's got this great sense of history. I mean, he's seen it. You know, he grew up when the treasury was still controlling the Fed. You know, he remembers the great accord when Eccles was able to separate and make the Fed really separate from the Treasury after the war. And he wrote his thesis when he was at Princeton on Federal Reserve and the need for it to be independent. This is something he's cared about his whole life, but he also knows that sort of almost every president he's seen operate has in some way tried to attack the Federal Reserve. And so keeping at it is sort of... Because this is not a new battle we're fighting. It kind of goes on and on throughout history and will continue and you need, I guess, people.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A willingness to invest in government has really been eroded over time back to the sort of Reagan sort of like, oh, we got to cut the government. So this idea that government's the problem, starve the government, and then complain that government is no good. So let's starve the government some more. It's sort of been going on for a long time. And the consequences are obvious. He has this thing called Volcker Alliance, which is all about trying to train people for government, make government run more efficiently. And he really believes passionately in just making sure people in the government know how to do their jobs well. I mean, so much of government nowadays is outsourcing. And if you aren't trained to deal with managing loads of people externally who are handling things for you, if you're not good at all that, if everybody who gets that kind of training goes into business and not into government, then you're going to end up with a pretty bad system. So this is sort of his passion.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's definitely on his mind. He's very disturbed about how Washington is being managed these days. And as he says sort of throughout the book, this lack of trust in government, which is really corrosive to a democracy, is... Sort of rooted in the fact that people have over time lost the faith that government can do what they expected to do. And in part, it's because the government has just gotten responsible for more and more, first of all, the population has gotten much bigger. There's many more things we expect government to do for us than when he was growing up. But also just this.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Told me some stories that when I reminded him of them, he said, oh no, let's not bother with that one. Yes, I mean, in part because he didn't want the book to be so long. He's sort of a funny, very self-deprecating, and he didn't want a book that was, you know, this gigantic tome. He didn't want something that sounded really pompous in terms of the title or anything. you know, wanted to keep it pretty short and to the point. And yeah, there were some stories that are amusing. He loves, I mean, one of the things people don't know about him if they haven't spent time with him is that I certainly didn't know this, is that he's incredibly funny. He loves to tell stories and he's really, really funny. And he's very wry and, you know, kind of, he loves gossiping.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you decide that 2% is your target, you're essentially agreeing to double prices every generation, and you're also going to fall into a slippery slope of, oh, what if 2% doesn't get us the employment we want, then maybe let's just raise it to 3%. It just makes it too easy. He believes in a more principle-based idea of sort of instead of targeting a number, just targeting when business and consumer decisions are not affected by inflation.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appease the masses is to just cut the value of the currency. And so he strongly objects to, I mean, he has a section in there about how, and this was excerpted on Bloomberg opinion a few weeks ago about what he considers the folly of the targeting of the 2% inflation rate. I mean, it drives him absolutely insane to see people as they were this summer sort of agonizing over that we have inflation of only 1.7% and how do we get it to 2%? And he's like, first of all, none of these measures are so precise. It's absurdity to try to act as though you can do that with such precision. Second of all,”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not an economist, so I'm not a good person to comment on that. I know what he would say, which is that he feels ultimately the number one almost moral requirement of the central bank is to make sure that the value of money isn't eroded. And that over history, you know, that's been the easiest way for governments to kind of try to, you know.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was a big psychological shift that he sort of engineered to, in a way, inoculate them from criticism that they were raising rates. Because up until then, the Fed always sort of shied away from the rate increases that were need. So inflation was ahead of the interest rates. In order to do something about it and sort of prevent the Fed from having to take the heat in a way from itself, they just sort of he describes it as being lashed to the mast. They just said we're all about the money supply. Rates are going to do what they are going to do. It's not what we're doing. Kind of like we're not responsible for rates. And that was kind of a great psychological. Instinct”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the businessmen sitting next to him afterwards piped up and said, That's all very well and good, but I just finished my negotiations with my workforce and I'm giving them 13% raise a year for the next three years. And he writes, you know, I wonder how it worked out for that guy, because people really didn't believe him. By the time Volcker got in there, people thought it was lost. I mean, Arthur Burns gave a speech in 1979 at the Pair Jacobson lecture, the anguish of central banking. basically it was saying that politics were too difficult it was impossible for central bankers to do anything about this and at that very moment Paul Volcker was flying back from Belgrade where the IMF meeting was to the Fed to have these emergency meetings to come out with the Saturday night surprise october nineteen seventy nine where they announced that they were changing how they targeted they were going to start targeting the money supply instead of the interest rate”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think hosted by Arthur Levitt. And there were a whole bunch of businessmen. And he gave his spiel, Volcker gave his Spiel about how he was going to, it was going to be a tough fight, he was going to get inflation down, and he promised that it was going to be good for the economy and down the road, everything would be fine.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While he was brought in, as he describes, at this time of such crisis it was almost like being a general called in to help fight a war. I mean, there was nothing that was more important to helping get the country back on its feet at that point than making sure we did something about inflation. So even though he recognizes that it caused a lot of pain for a lot of people to have interest rates go up so much and monetary policy get so tight, he also will assert, and he does over and over again, that there was no way to help people other than get the inflation rate down. If you didn't get the inflation rate down, all was lost. So he had to do it. He had to do what he did. And a lot of it was psychological. He tells a story in there about after he'd been Fed chairman for just a little while, he was called to a meeting at the American Stock Exchange.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his he seen over the last few decades, and he sort of traces it back to Reagan, this sort of belief that government is the problem, that government isn't worth investing in, really sort of corrupt our system. And he's been fighting against it since he left the Fed, but he hasn't succeeded. And now I think he and a lot of people would agree were at a point of almost crisis in this respect.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The highest calling. And so everything he's done in his career has been informed by this idea that there's a really noble pursuit in helping make government work better. And he documents in the book all the ways in which he failed. Like he feels very depressed about how he wasn't able to save Bretton Woods. He tried really hard to create a new monetary system that would replace it and never was able to, and kind of writes a nice part of the book is where he sort of explains why he now realizes it was never going to work. But he really wanted it to. He really believed in trying to, he's kind of almost the ultimate technocrat.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a town that was sighted by the United States Army in the occupied countries after the war as the model community that they should base their democracies on. It was touted in the Saturday evening post as the crime-free town. It was just a sort of an amazing success. So Paul Volcker Jr. grew up believing there was no higher calling than helping to make your community and your government better. And he went to Princeton at a time when the university was, the president of the university was a professor of public administration. He went to the Littauer Center, which is now the Kennedy School at Harvard, which was all about government. Everybody there wanted to go into government. All the economists who were his classmates, they all wanted to go into government. That was kind of seen as...”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the overriding things about him and sort of a foundational element of his career was that he grew up during the Depression and World War II with a father who was part of a sort of good government reform movement in the United States. His father was a son of German immigrants, grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, ended up getting a great education, fortunately, and became an engineer. But also ended up going into city management at a time when there's sort of a big move towards ending the corruption of the political sort of Tammany Hall type of politics at the time. So Paul Volcker Sr. became town manager of this New Jersey town Teeneck, New Jersey, where Paul Volcker Jr. grew up and completely turned it around. I mean, he did an amazing job of making this town that was basically almost bankrupt.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. And I read a book that he wrote with a former Japanese official named Tuyu Goten, who they wrote together back 25 years ago, sort of a series of pieces about their involvement in international monetary system reform, which is really good. It's called Changing Fortunes. So a lot of his stories had been told, but it was really about getting to tell it his way and getting to tell things that maybe biographers hadn't thought were so important. You know, he has a chapter in there, for instance, about the importance of accounting reform. He has a chapter in there about his involvement with, you know, trying to reform the UN and the World Bank. So those weren't always the sexiest topics for his biographers, but he really cares about these things. So he wanted to write about all the ways in which he was involved, not only at the Fed, but throughout, you know, his career.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I first met him, he was 89. He turned 90 late last year, and then he just turned 91. He wanted to put down his story in his own words. There have been three biographies written of him, which was a little daunting when I realized that, you know, because...”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“vehemently disagree with me on something, but actually we had an amazing experience and I was very lucky that we got along so well. And so Peter Osnos was right. It was a good combination.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go through documents and make kind of tiny changes. But he's lovely collaborator. And I kept worrying that at some point he might become really”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An editor and a sort of a coach. And we would kind of send edits back and forth. And he's great. I mean, he's also a natural copy editor. He loves to...”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he has an assistant who typed them all up and would email them to me, and I would just go through this and edit and say, hey, you told me this great story. Let's add it in. You didn't put it in. Or why don't we recast it a little bit? So I ended up becoming sort of more of a.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is not easily sort of guided to do anything. He knows what he wants and he gets it. So there was no point really going there and trying to tell him what we wanted to talk about. I would sort of go in and say, hey, let's, you know, where do you want to start? And he'd say, okay, let's start at the beginning. We talk. And also I should say that what happened after we did a whole bunch of interviews, I got a lot of transcriptions of these interviews, which proved to be very helpful. But he also then started just writing himself. He started writing on yellow pads.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story of America and the world, but Just about sort of government and integrity How to live a really good life over 90 years.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a phenomenal experience. Basically, I spent the last year and a half kind of almost daily or a few times a week at least seeing this great man.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, interview him and then try to pull it all together into a book. So I was very surprised. I knew Peter a little bit, but I was really not expecting to be asked to do anything like this. And it was a big surprise. But obviously I couldn't think of a book I'd rather work on, what a legend. And I kept thinking throughout the process that no matter what happened, I'd get to spend a lot of time with Paul Volcker.”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really have to admit it was a pure luck. Has worked in the past with a publisher named Peter Osnos, who founded a publishing imprint called Public Affairs, which is now part of Hashet. And Paul and Peter had some discussions about how Paul maybe after all these years might want to write a memoir. And so Peter wanted to make that happen and wanted to find somebody to work with Paul on it. And he thought it was very important it be somebody in New York who knows a little bit about finance but who wouldn't dominate the process and who would have the right kind of chemistry with him and could kind of regularly go and meet with Paul and talk about”
2018-11-26 · Odd Lots · How Paul Volcker Views His Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source