Financial History Issue 132 (Winter 2020) | Page 22

When the President Calls
An Interview with Paul A. Volcker
By Simon W. Bowmaker
The following conversation has been
adapted from Simon Bowmaker’s inter-
view with Paul Volcker and is published in
honor of his passing on December 8, 2019.
Mr. Volcker was an active member of the
Museum of American Finance’s Advisory
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker
testifies before the Joint Economic Committee
on May 14, 2008 on Capitol Hill in Washington,
DC. The full committee met for a hearing on “Wall
Street to Main Street: Is the Credit Crisis Over and
What Can the Federal Government Do to Prevent
Unnecessary Systemic Risk in the Future?”
Council and the recipient of the Muse-
um’s prestigious Whitehead Award for
Distinguished Public Service and Finan-
cial Leadership in 2009. The full version of
Professor Bowmaker’s interview with Mr.
Volcker is available in When the President
Calls: Conversations with Economic Policy-
makers (MIT Press, 2019).
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Bowmaker: Why did you become an
economist?
Volcker: When I went to college at Princ-
eton just after the war, I took economics
and it intrigued me. For some unknown
20    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Winter 2020  | www.MoAF.org
reason, my introduction to the subject
was a course on comparative economic
systems, which wasn’t the kind of Eco-
nomics 101 version that you see today.
Then I jumped into the most advanced
economic theory class available, which
was about business cycles. It was taught
by Ozkar von Morgenstern, so I became
fully developed in the Austrian school.
I also took a money and banking course
from Friedrich Lutz, which was attractive
because it seemed to have more precision
than other economics disciplines in those
days—balance sheets had to balance, for
example, although I now understand they
don’t necessarily have to do so.