person
Paul Volcker
American central banker (1927–2019). Federal Reserve Chair 1979–1987. Principal architect of the disinflation that ended the 1970s stagflation and reset US monetary-policy practice for a generation.
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Paul Volcker’s career in the US Treasury and Federal Reserve System spanned more than five decades. As Federal Reserve Chair from August 1979 to August 1987, he conducted the disinflation that ended the 1970s stagflation episode — switching Fed operating procedures to non-borrowed-reserve targeting in October 1979, tolerating a rise in the Federal Funds rate from approximately 11 percent to a peak of 19 percent by mid-1981, and accepting the deepest postwar US recession (unemployment peaking at 10.8 percent in late 1982) as the cost. By late 1983 CPI inflation had fallen from 13.5 percent to 3.2 percent. The episode is the single most consequential test of competing macroeconomic frameworks in the postwar era; its broad terms (Friedman on the diagnosis, monetarist on the operating procedure) shaped Federal Reserve culture for the following thirty years.
Volcker chaired the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Obama (2009–2011); the “Volcker Rule” provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act bears his name. His 2018 memoir Keeping At It is the principal first-person account of the disinflation from the central-bank side.