Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe. Joe. Who's your favorite
Speaker 1: central banker? Oh? Wow, good question right now? Or throughout history?
Speaker 1: Throughout history? You know what's funny, I'm kind of on
Speaker 1: an Allen greenspand kick to you dad. Oh controversial choice. Why? Well,
Speaker 1: because he seems to have a lot of relevance right now.
Speaker 1: Like everybody in the late nineties was predicting inflation was
Speaker 1: gonna happen, but he didn't believe it would happen. You vegged,
Speaker 1: you got into some arguments with Janet Yellen, and the
Speaker 1: economy had this big boom because he let monetary policy
Speaker 1: run easy and unemployment dropped further than anyone thought. Then
Speaker 1: there was this huge bubble and then there was this
Speaker 1: huge crash. So, you know, you kind of there are
Speaker 1: some good aspects of his legacy, but also maybe some
Speaker 1: lessons to learn on the negative side too. What about you?
Speaker 1: What's your favorite? Oh god, um, I'm going to completely
Speaker 1: sidestep the question because I want to get to the
Speaker 1: point of the question that I just asked you, which
Speaker 1: you summarized perfectly, and that's the notion that you know,
Speaker 1: throughout central bankers working lives, their professional lives, they kind
Speaker 1: of fall in and out of favor with each other
Speaker 1: and also with the general public. And it's really interesting
Speaker 1: to watch that happen. Absolutely, I mean, even like the
Speaker 1: very recent FED shares for example, I think that's the case.
Speaker 1: So I think people were very into bernanke and yelling
Speaker 1: for a while, and of course bernanky for the actors
Speaker 1: he took in stemming the financial crisis. But then you
Speaker 1: look now and you see that inflation is still cool
Speaker 1: and unemployment his dropped much further than they expected, and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, did they tightened policy too quickly? So
Speaker 1: subsequent events, whether their crashes or changing economic conditions, can
Speaker 1: really um shade how we saw a banker, a central banker,
Speaker 1: even just one that was in office a few years
Speaker 1: ago exactly. And do you ever wonder what the central
Speaker 1: bankers themselves think of what they are doing when they're
Speaker 1: in office. I always do, Like, you know, does Jerome
Speaker 1: Powell stay up late at night worrying that he's making
Speaker 1: a policy mistake? What was Yelling thinking over the past
Speaker 1: few years, What was Alan Greenspan thinking immediately after the
Speaker 1: financial crisis. These are all very interesting questions, and today
Speaker 1: we're going to explore all of those through the prism
Speaker 1: of one former FED governor in particular, and that is
Speaker 1: Paul Volker. Yeah. I'm really excited about this episode. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously right before Greenspan definitely a sort of
Speaker 1: legendary central banker, and whose influence in terms of expectations
Speaker 1: regarding again flation and FED independent and making difficult choices
Speaker 1: in the face of political opposition still looms large today.
Speaker 1: So I think his life and career hold a lot
Speaker 1: of lessons for right now. Yeah, and we are very
Speaker 1: lucky at Bloomberg because one of our colleagues, Christine Harper,
Speaker 1: she's the editor of Bloomberg Markets magazine, has actually co
Speaker 1: authored Paul Volker's autobiography. It's called Keeping Edit, The Quest
Speaker 1: for Sound Money and Good Government. It just came out,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to get to ask her all
Speaker 1: these things about what Paul Volker was thinking and how
Speaker 1: he actually was considering his legacy throughout the years. Can't wait. Christine,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us. You're lighted to be here.
Speaker 1: So I have to admit when I first heard that
Speaker 1: you were co authoring a book with Paul Volker. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what was going on. Can you please
Speaker 1: explain how you actually know him and how this project
Speaker 1: got started? Well, I really have to admit it was
Speaker 1: a pure luck. He has worked in the past with
Speaker 1: a publisher named Peter Osnos, who founded a publishing imprint
Speaker 1: called Public Affairs, which is now part of Hashat, and
Speaker 1: Paul and Peter had some discussions about how Paul, maybe
Speaker 1: after all these years, might want to write a memoir,
Speaker 1: and so Peter wanted to make that happen, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to find somebody to work with Paul on it,
Speaker 1: and he thought it was very important. It'd be somebody
Speaker 1: in New York who knows a little bit about finance,
Speaker 1: but who wouldn't dominate the process, and who would have
Speaker 1: the right kind of chemistry with him and could kind
Speaker 1: of regularly go and meet with um Paul and talk
Speaker 1: about you know, basically interview him and then try to
Speaker 1: pull it all together into a book. So I I
Speaker 1: was very surprised. Eyes I knew, I knew Peter a
Speaker 1: little bit, but I was really not, you know, expecting
Speaker 1: to be asked to do anything like this. And it
Speaker 1: was a big surprise. And but obviously I couldn't think
Speaker 1: of a book. I'd rather work on um what I legend.
Speaker 1: And I kept thinking throughout the process that no matter
Speaker 1: what happened, I'd get to spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: with Paul Wolker. So it was a phenomenal experience. Basically
Speaker 1: spent the last year and a half kind of almost
Speaker 1: daily and you know, or you know, a few times
Speaker 1: a week at least, seeing um, this great man, listening
Speaker 1: to his stories, getting to work with him, learning a
Speaker 1: great deal about not only the history of the economic
Speaker 1: story of America and the world, but just about sort
Speaker 1: of government and integrity and how to live a really
Speaker 1: good life over ninety years. How does this start? So
Speaker 1: you interviewed him, But like, did you have like a
Speaker 1: sort of mapped out idea of the interviews or do
Speaker 1: you just start and say, all right, Paul started telling
Speaker 1: me your story and let's hear this guy. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: basically took that approach. I had no idea. First of all,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, he's a he's a pretty amazing man.
Speaker 1: You know, he's six ft seven, he's served under six presidents.
Speaker 1: You know, he is not easily sort of guided to
Speaker 1: do anything. He knows what he wants and he gets it.
Speaker 1: So there was no point really going there and trying
Speaker 1: to tell him what we wanted to talk about. I
Speaker 1: would I would sort of go in and say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's you know, where do you want to start? And
Speaker 1: he'd say, okay, let's start at the beginning we talked.
Speaker 1: And also I should say that what happened after we
Speaker 1: were We did a whole bunch of interviews. I got
Speaker 1: a lot of transcriptions of these interviews, which proved to
Speaker 1: be very helpful. But he also then started just writing himself.
Speaker 1: He started writing on yellow pads, which is his long
Speaker 1: time practice. He doesn't type, and uh, he he has
Speaker 1: a He has an assistant who typed them all up
Speaker 1: and would email them to me. And I would just
Speaker 1: go through this and you know, edit and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you told me this great story, let's add it in
Speaker 1: you didn't put it in, or you know, why don't
Speaker 1: we recast it a little bit. So I ended up
Speaker 1: becoming sort of more of a an editor and a
Speaker 1: sort of a coach, and uh, we would kind of
Speaker 1: send edits back and forth. And he's great. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's also a natural copy editor. He loves to he
Speaker 1: loves to go through documents and make kind of tiny,
Speaker 1: you know changes. Um, But he's lovely, he's he's a
Speaker 1: lovely collaborator. And I kept worrying that at some point
Speaker 1: he might become really, really tough to deal with, because
Speaker 1: obviously he has to have really, um, you know, strong will,
Speaker 1: and I thought at some point he might vehemently disagree
Speaker 1: with me on something. But actually we we had an
Speaker 1: amazing experience and um, you know, it was very lucky,
Speaker 1: um that we got along so well. And so Peter
Speaker 1: Osinos was was right. It was a good combination. Uh
Speaker 1: So when you when you first met him to discuss
Speaker 1: this project, Paul, I mean, what did he tell you
Speaker 1: about what he was trying to do? What were his
Speaker 1: motivations for for doing this at the age of I
Speaker 1: think he's ninety one or something like that now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when I first met him, he was eighty nine.
Speaker 1: He turned ninety late last year and then he just
Speaker 1: turned one. He wanted to put down his story in
Speaker 1: his own words. There have been three biographies written of him,
Speaker 1: which was a little daunting when I realized that, you know,
Speaker 1: because I did and I read a book that he
Speaker 1: wrote with a former Japanese official named Toyou Goten, who
Speaker 1: they wrote together back twenty five years ago, a sort
Speaker 1: of a series of pieces about their involvement in international
Speaker 1: monetary system reform, which is really good. It's called changing Fortunes.
Speaker 1: So there are a lot of a lot of his
Speaker 1: stories had been told, um, but it was really about
Speaker 1: getting to tell it his way, and getting to tell
Speaker 1: things that maybe biographers hadn't thought were so important. You know,
Speaker 1: he has a chapter in there, for instance, about the
Speaker 1: importance of accounting reform. He has a chapter in there
Speaker 1: about his involvement with you know, trying to reform the
Speaker 1: u N and the and the World Bank. So those
Speaker 1: weren't always the sexiest topics for his biographers, but he
Speaker 1: really cares about these things. So he he wanted to
Speaker 1: He wanted to write about all the ways in which
Speaker 1: he was involved, not only at the FED but throughout
Speaker 1: you know, his career, and and about the importance of
Speaker 1: public service. So what is the overriding theme when it
Speaker 1: when it's accounting reform, when it's World Bank, when did
Speaker 1: this sort of global monetary reform? What is the common
Speaker 1: thread with which he approaches these big topics? One of
Speaker 1: the overriding things about him and sort of the foundational
Speaker 1: element of his career was that he grew up during
Speaker 1: the depression in the World War Two with a father
Speaker 1: who was part of us Are Good Government reform movement
Speaker 1: in the United States. His father was a son of
Speaker 1: German immigrants, grew up in East New York Brooklyn, ended
Speaker 1: up getting a great education fortunately and became an engineer,
Speaker 1: but also ended up going into city management at a
Speaker 1: time when they're sort of a big move towards ending
Speaker 1: the corruption of the political sort of Tammany Hall type
Speaker 1: of politics at the time. And uh so Paul Wolker Sr.
Speaker 1: Became town manager of this of this New jerseytown, te Neck,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, where Paul Wolker Jr. Grew up and completely
Speaker 1: turned it around. And he did an amazing job of
Speaker 1: making this town that was basically almost bankrupt into a
Speaker 1: town that was cited by the United States Army in
Speaker 1: the occupied countries after the war as the model community
Speaker 1: that they should base their democracies on. It was touted
Speaker 1: in the Saturday Evening Post as the crime free town.
Speaker 1: It was just a sort of amazing success. So Paul
Speaker 1: Wolker Jr. Grew up believing there was no higher calling
Speaker 1: than helping to make your community and your government better,
Speaker 1: and he went to the He went to Princeton at
Speaker 1: a time when the university was run the president of
Speaker 1: the university was a professor of public administration. He went
Speaker 1: to the Littower Center, which is now the Kennedy School
Speaker 1: at Harvard, which was all about government. Everybody there wanted
Speaker 1: to go into government. Um, all the economists he was,
Speaker 1: who were his classmates, they all wanted to go into government.
Speaker 1: That was kind of seen as the highest calling. And
Speaker 1: so everything he's done in his career has been informed
Speaker 1: by this idea that there's a really noble um pursuit
Speaker 1: and helping make government work better. And uh. He documents
Speaker 1: in the in the book all the ways in which
Speaker 1: he failed, Like he feels very depressed about how he
Speaker 1: wasn't able to save Breton Woods. He tried really hard
Speaker 1: to create a new monetary system that would replace it
Speaker 1: and never was able to and kind of writes A
Speaker 1: nice part of the of the book is where he
Speaker 1: he sort of explains why he now realizes it was
Speaker 1: never gonna work, but he really wanted it. He really
Speaker 1: believed in trying to he he's kind of almost the
Speaker 1: ultimate technocrat, and his he's seen over the last few decades,
Speaker 1: and he sort of traces it back to Reagan, this
Speaker 1: sort of belief that government is the problem, that you know,
Speaker 1: government isn't worth investing in, really sort of corrupt our system.
Speaker 1: And he's he's been fighting against it since he left
Speaker 1: the FED, but he hasn't you know, succeeded. And uh
Speaker 1: now I think he and a lot of people would agree,
Speaker 1: we're at a point of almost crisis in this in
Speaker 1: this respect. So on that note, I'm curious, you're clearly
Speaker 1: painting a picture of a guy who cares very much
Speaker 1: about public service. How did he balance that care of
Speaker 1: public service with independence of the central bank? Because, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, when he came into the FED, I think
Speaker 1: it was nine nine, inflation was running incredibly high and
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter complaining a lot about it. So how did
Speaker 1: he make sure that he sort of paid attention to
Speaker 1: the needs of the American population while simultaneously maintaining the
Speaker 1: independence of the central bank. Well, he was brought in,
Speaker 1: as he describes, at this time of such crisis. It
Speaker 1: was almost like being a general called in to help
Speaker 1: fight a war. I mean, there was nothing that was
Speaker 1: more important to helping get the country back on its
Speaker 1: feet at that point than making sure we did something
Speaker 1: about inflation. So even though he recognizes that it caused
Speaker 1: a lot of pain for a lot of people to
Speaker 1: have interest rates go up so much and monetary policy
Speaker 1: gets so tight, he also will assert, and he does
Speaker 1: over and over again, that there was no way to
Speaker 1: help people other than get the inflation right down. If
Speaker 1: you didn't get the inflation right down, all was lost.
Speaker 1: So he had to do it. He had to do
Speaker 1: what he did, and a lot of it was psychological.
Speaker 1: He tell the story. And there about after he'd been
Speaker 1: fed chairman for m you know, just a little while,
Speaker 1: he was called to a meeting at the American Stock Exchange,
Speaker 1: I think, hosted by Arthur Levitt, and there are a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of businessmen and he gave his spiel. Vulker
Speaker 1: gave his spiel about how he was gonna it was
Speaker 1: gonna be a tough fight, and he was going to
Speaker 1: get inflation down, and he promised that it was gonna
Speaker 1: be good for the economy and down the road everything
Speaker 1: would be fine. And one of the businessmen sitting next
Speaker 1: to him. Afterwards piped up and said, that's all very
Speaker 1: well and good, but I just finished my negotiations with
Speaker 1: my workforce and I'm giving them thirent raise a year
Speaker 1: for the next three years. And he writes, you know,
Speaker 1: I wonder how that guy. How it worked out for
Speaker 1: that guy, you know, because people really didn't believe him.
Speaker 1: By the time Vulcan got in there, people thought it
Speaker 1: was lost. I mean, Arthur Burns gave a speech in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine at the Pair Jacobson Lecture, the Anguish
Speaker 1: of Central Banking like it was basically, it was saying
Speaker 1: that politics were too difficult, it was impossible for central
Speaker 1: bankers to do anything about this. And at that very moment,
Speaker 1: Paul Vulker was flying back from Belgrade where the I
Speaker 1: m F meeting was, to the to the Fed to
Speaker 1: have these emergency meetings to come out with the Saturday
Speaker 1: Night Surprise October nine, where they announced that they were
Speaker 1: changing how they targeted. They were going to start targeting
Speaker 1: the money supply instead of the interest rate. And that
Speaker 1: was a big psychological shift to that He sort of
Speaker 1: engineered too in a way and oculate them from criticism
Speaker 1: that they were raising rates because but up to until then,
Speaker 1: the Fed always sort of shied away from the rate
Speaker 1: increases that were needs. So inflation was was ahead of
Speaker 1: the of the interest rates. So in order to do
Speaker 1: something about it and and sort of prevent the Fed
Speaker 1: from having to take the heat in a way from itself, Hey,
Speaker 1: they just sort of he he described it as being
Speaker 1: lashed to the mast. They were. They just said, we're
Speaker 1: just we're all about the money supply. Rates are going
Speaker 1: to do what they are are going to do. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not what we're doing. We're kind of like,
Speaker 1: we're not responsible for rates. And uh, that was kind
Speaker 1: of a great psychological instinct he had. I'm curious about
Speaker 1: the lessons for today, because if you hear central bankers now,
Speaker 1: they talk a lot about inflation and the importance of
Speaker 1: guarding against any sort of uplift and inflation or inflation expectations.
Speaker 1: They talk about the sort of hard one credibility of
Speaker 1: the Federal Reserve, which I think definitely starts with Vulcan.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, unemployment has been extremely high even
Speaker 1: up until very recently, and arguably it's still elevated when
Speaker 1: you look at various measures of inflation, and so to
Speaker 1: sort of push back against Volker's legacy a little bit,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering what you think of the argument that central
Speaker 1: bankers have become so focused on inflation that in the
Speaker 1: last decade they sort of threw their hands up about unemployment,
Speaker 1: the other half of their mandate and said, you know,
Speaker 1: just the same way that Arthur Burns may have said, look,
Speaker 1: there's nothing you know, central banks, we can't do anything
Speaker 1: about inflation anymore because of politics, whether in the post
Speaker 1: crisis period everyone was like, oh, central bankers like unemployment
Speaker 1: is other people's problem, or it's fiscal policy makers, or
Speaker 1: it's the problem of the skills gap, and sort of
Speaker 1: ignoring the fact that maybe there was something they could
Speaker 1: have done about that. Well, I'm not an economist, so
Speaker 1: I'm not a good, good, good person to comment on that.
Speaker 1: I know what he would say, which is that he
Speaker 1: feels ultimately the number one, almost moral requirement of the
Speaker 1: central bank is to make sure that the value of
Speaker 1: money isn't isn't eroded, and that over history, you know,
Speaker 1: that's been the easiest way for governments to kind of
Speaker 1: try to, you know, appease the masses, is to just
Speaker 1: you know, cut the value of the currency. And uh,
Speaker 1: and so he strongly objects to I mean he there
Speaker 1: he has a section in there about how and this
Speaker 1: was uh excerpted on Bloomberg Opinion a few weeks ago
Speaker 1: about what he considers the folly of the targeting of
Speaker 1: the two percent, the two percent inflation rate. I mean,
Speaker 1: he it drives him absolutely insane to see people as
Speaker 1: they were this summer, sort of agonizing over you know
Speaker 1: that we have inflation of only one point seven percent,
Speaker 1: and how do we get it to two percent? And
Speaker 1: he's like, first of all, none of these measures are
Speaker 1: so precise. It's it's it's absurdity to try to act
Speaker 1: as though you can do that with such precision. Second
Speaker 1: of all, once you decide that two is your target,
Speaker 1: you're essentially agreeing to double prices every generation. And you're
Speaker 1: also going to fall into a slippery slope of, oh,
Speaker 1: what if two percent doesn't get us the unemployment we want,
Speaker 1: then maybe let's just raise it to three percent. And
Speaker 1: it just makes it too easy. He believes in a
Speaker 1: more principle based idea of sort of instead of targeting
Speaker 1: a number, just targeting, you know, when business and consumer
Speaker 1: decisions are not affected by inflation. Okay, here's what I
Speaker 1: really want to know. In the course of all your
Speaker 1: meetings with Vulcar, did he ever tell you stuff that
Speaker 1: he didn't want put into the book? Are there things
Speaker 1: that he would rather sort of keep out of his
Speaker 1: own story. I'm not asking for specifics. I'm just curious
Speaker 1: if there are certain controversial things that he wouldn't go into.
Speaker 1: He told me some stories that when I when I
Speaker 1: reminded him of them, he said, no, let's not let's
Speaker 1: not bother with that one. Yes, I mean, in part
Speaker 1: because he didn't want the book to be so long.
Speaker 1: He's sort of a funny, uh, you know, very self deprecating,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't He didn't want a book that was,
Speaker 1: you know, this gigantic tone. He didn't want something that
Speaker 1: sounded really pompous in terms of the title or anything.
Speaker 1: He wanted to keep it pretty short and to the
Speaker 1: to the point. And uh, and yeah, there were some
Speaker 1: stories that are amusing. He loves I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the things people don't know about him if they haven't
Speaker 1: spent time with him, is that I certainly didn't know
Speaker 1: this is that he's incredibly funny. He loves to tell stories,
Speaker 1: and he's really really funny, and he's very right, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of he loves gossiping. I'm curious thinking
Speaker 1: about it, the book coming out now, and obviously we
Speaker 1: live in an interesting time for central bankers, but you
Speaker 1: sort of I said this earlier. The bigger picture is
Speaker 1: that we live in a very interesting time for governance.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious how much the very current government set
Speaker 1: up in the US, whether it's the attacks on the
Speaker 1: federal reserves, independence from President Trump, or just the sort
Speaker 1: of unconventional nature of the Trump presidency, or the various
Speaker 1: things we've seen in Congress in recent years, whether it's
Speaker 1: the dead sailing things like that of sort of naked
Speaker 1: a attempt to get political advantage by sort of weakening
Speaker 1: governance in this country. How much that was on his
Speaker 1: mind with the book coming out right now. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's you know, it's definitely on his mind. He's
Speaker 1: very disturbed about how, you know, Washington is being managed
Speaker 1: these days. And as he says sort of throughout the book,
Speaker 1: this lack of trust in government, which is really corrosive
Speaker 1: to a democracy, is sort of rooted in the fact
Speaker 1: that people have over time loss of faith that government
Speaker 1: can do what they expected to do. And and in
Speaker 1: part it's because the government is just kind of responsible
Speaker 1: for more and more. First of all, the population has
Speaker 1: gotten much bigger. There's many more things we expect government
Speaker 1: to do for us than when he was growing up.
Speaker 1: But also just this a willingness to invest in government
Speaker 1: has really been eroded over time, back to the sort
Speaker 1: of Reagan sort of like, oh, we got to cut
Speaker 1: the government. So this idea that like government is the problem,
Speaker 1: start of the government, and then complain that government is
Speaker 1: no good, so let's start of the government some more.
Speaker 1: It's sort of been going on for a long time,
Speaker 1: and you know, the consequences are obvious. His he has
Speaker 1: this thing called Vulgar Alliance, which is all about trying
Speaker 1: to train people for government, make government run more efficiently,
Speaker 1: and he really believes passionately and just making sure people
Speaker 1: in the government know how to do their jobs. Well.
Speaker 1: I mean, so much of government nowadays is outsourcing, and
Speaker 1: if you aren't trained to deal with, you know, managing
Speaker 1: loads of people externally who are handling things for you,
Speaker 1: if you're not good at good at all. That if
Speaker 1: everybody who gets that kind of training goes into business
Speaker 1: and not into government. Then you know you're gonna end
Speaker 1: up with a pretty bad system. So this is sort
Speaker 1: of his his passion. And then in terms of the
Speaker 1: attacks on things like the FED, obviously you know that
Speaker 1: disturbs him. But you know he's got this great sense
Speaker 1: of history. I mean, he's seen it. You know, he
Speaker 1: grew up when the Treasury was still controlling the FED.
Speaker 1: You know, he remembers the Great Accord when Eccles was
Speaker 1: able to separate and make the FED really really separate
Speaker 1: from the Treasury after the war. And uh, he wrote
Speaker 1: his thesis when he was at Princeton on Federal Reserve
Speaker 1: and the need for it to be independent. So you know,
Speaker 1: this is something he's cared about his whole life. But
Speaker 1: he also knows that sort of almost every president he's
Speaker 1: seen operate has in some way tried to, you know,
Speaker 1: attack the Federal Reserve and and so um, keeping at
Speaker 1: it is sort of the title because this is this
Speaker 1: is not a new battle we're fighting. It's it kind
Speaker 1: of goes on and on throughout history and will continue
Speaker 1: and and you need, I guess people like Paul Volker
Speaker 1: to sort of stand on the right side of things
Speaker 1: Christine Harper, editor of Bloomberg Markets magazine and the author
Speaker 1: co author, I should say, of keeping at it The
Speaker 1: Quest for Sound Money and Good Government, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. Great podcast you
Speaker 1: guys have so Joe. I have to admit I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit jealous after listening to that conversation because I
Speaker 1: just imagine, you know, Christine is sort of hanging out
Speaker 1: at Paul Wulker's house and they're drinking wine, and he's
Speaker 1: telling her all these really interesting stories about back when
Speaker 1: the financial system was sort of on the brink. I
Speaker 1: bet that would be a really great experience to have. Now.
Speaker 1: I kind of want to do that. I know, I
Speaker 1: want to do that, Like just take a year and
Speaker 1: find some really fascinating historical figure and just talk to
Speaker 1: them forever and get their entire story. I have to say,
Speaker 1: it sounds pretty great. Yeah. And of course, the interesting
Speaker 1: thing which we alluded to in the intro is the
Speaker 1: way that central bankers own reputation and legacy sort of
Speaker 1: evolves along with I guess the economy. Really, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of people who were sort of vilified by events
Speaker 1: that they arguably helped cause, and then there are other
Speaker 1: people that it seems to have worked out for, and
Speaker 1: of course they're now celebrated as heroes. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1: think another really important aspect of Vulcar's legacy is beyond
Speaker 1: the specific monetary policy decisions that he made during the
Speaker 1: era of double digit inflation, is this idea that he's
Speaker 1: sort of bigger than a central just a central banker.
Speaker 1: And thinking about him working for the Obama administration during
Speaker 1: the drafting of the Dodd Frank regulatory reform, of course
Speaker 1: the famous like Vulcar rule. It's obvious and of course
Speaker 1: this was we're talking about, but it's obvious that his
Speaker 1: reputation is as someone who could just sort of be
Speaker 1: trusted as someone of a person of integrity. So that
Speaker 1: sort of no matter what specifically the issue is, his
Speaker 1: judgment is seen as a wise counsel, someone who can
Speaker 1: be um trusted to make a sort of bring a
Speaker 1: big picture, good government perspective to whatever the problem is. Right,
Speaker 1: And on that note, I have one thing to say,
Speaker 1: which is poll vocer for the odd Lots accounting series. Yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: I had that same thought, like maybe we should do
Speaker 1: just right. We have to. We still have to revisit
Speaker 1: our accounting series. I don't know when we'll get to that,
Speaker 1: but we should do one on vocals proposed reforms. Well
Speaker 1: I need to We need to read that book that
Speaker 1: he co wrote with the Japanese economist. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: Well this has been another edition of the Odd Thoughts Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe wi Isn't all. You could
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Speaker 1: add fore Heast, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast,
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening, O