Word: volckerism
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Despite his brobdingnagian frame (6 ft. 7 in., 240 lbs.), his ever present cigar and his gravelly bass voice, Paul Volcker is a man who likes to keep a low profile, to perform his financial wizardry as a bureaucratic technician rather than as a public figure. But such behind-the-scenes machinations have their frustrations. One night, after an International Monetary Fund meeting in Copenhagen, Volcker was so exasperated with his colleagues that he strode down to the Tivoli Gardens and proceeded to throw wooden balls in a booth full of china plates until he had smashed away his tension...
...Volcker's problems in those days, when he was Nixon's Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, were chiefly with the French. But the French have also found ways to be accommodating. When Volcker stays in Paris, the Crillon Hotel installs the bed that was specially made for a famous 6-ft., 4-in. guest: General Charles de Gaulle. No other will hold the frame of the 51-year-old banker from New Jersey...
...Volcker is the only man in history who has officially devalued the U.S. dollar twice. As Under Secretary of the Treasury, he was the technician who hopped from chair to chair around the table negotiating various devaluation figures with the delegates to a 1971 currency conference in Washington. And in 1973 he secretly shuttled among the main industrial nations themselves, flying 31,000 miles in five days, losing his hat in Tokyo and exhausting his supply of cheap cigars and clean shirts before returning with an agreement...
...ironic that last week President Carter's appointment of Volcker to replace incoming Treasury Secretary G. William Miller as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank was generally viewed as a brilliant defense of the dollar. Said usually testy Senate Banking Committee Chairman William Proxmire: "The President has shown outstanding judgment. His appointment will be praised by Congress, by participants in domestic financial markets and by the international monetary community." Added the Brookings Institution's Robert Solomon: "The President couldn't have found a better man." The stock market shot up, bond prices improved, and, despite Carter...
...Volcker's years of toil in the world of interest and exchange rates-he is currently president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank-have made him a comfortable member of the international monetary club, unlike Miller, who was little known in the world's money markets when appointed. Financier Robert Roosa says of Volcker, "There's nobody in the world of international finance that he doesn't know." When Volcker used the word discipline a dozen times in his short press conference last week to describe his view of proper Federal Reserve policies, the international...