There’s the Legend of Paul Volcker and the Man I Got to Know
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With world-famous scowl, former fed chair could be forbidding
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But what struck me, again and again, was how he treated people
One evening about two years ago, I was at Paul Volcker’s Manhattan apartment when the phone rang. It was Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager, inviting Paul and his wife, Anke, to join him at the ballet on some future date. Soon after, Paul said that he and Anke had to leave for Brooklyn. They were attending a wake for his barber.
I walked home that evening, as I did after every meeting as we worked on his memoir, thinking about what a truly remarkable man he was. Of course, he was best known for his great public accomplishments: He was the point man at the Treasury Department in 1971 who managed the dollar’s untethering from gold; he quelled the double-digit inflation that took root in the U.S. in the late 1970s; he helped guide the country’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.
