Free Volcker by William L. Silber Page A

chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Board. Here he listens to an Obama address in New York City, flanked by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and real estate executive Penny Pritzker. (Photograph by Daniel Acker/European Pressphoto Agency)

    â€œHow about we call it the Obama Rule?” Volcker was not particularly pleased at having his name attached to the rule that restricted trading at banks. He thought it sounded boastful and might narrow his legacy to two words of limited scope. (Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Volcker loses—but finishes in the money: a racehorse named for the financial icon, ridden by John Velasquez, is beaten at Saratoga by a half length by Forum, under Javier Castellano, August 28, 2010. (Photograph from Thoroughbred Report.com)

    Cartoon by Bil Canfield. (Used with permission of PARS International)

    October 22, 1985, cartoon by Draper Hill. (Reprinted by permission of the
Detroit News)

    (Used with the permission of Steve Kelley and Creators Syndicate. All rights reserved)

    Cartoon by Joe Azar, originally published in
Legal Times
. (Reprinted by permission of Joe Azar)

Source Material and Data
    The narrative in this biography relies first and foremost on contemporary documents. These include: (1) publicly available documents, such as transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee and the minutes of meetings released by the U.S. Treasury; and (2) private documents made available from the personal files of Paul Volcker, such as personal correspondence and memos from the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Interviews with Paul Volcker and his contemporaries, those who worked both with him and for him, supplement the written record. Here are some details.
Documents
    References to the Personal Papers of Paul Volcker are documents given to me by Volcker from his personal files. References to documents held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York come from two sources: (1) documents from Volcker’s tenure as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which are the property of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and (2) documents shipped in 1987 from Volcker’s personal files at the Board of Governors for storage at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As of this writing (January 2012), both sets of materials, referred to as Federal Reserve Bank of New York Archives, are available from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    Minutes and transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee meetings (with exceptions noted) are publicly available documents and were sent in electronic form to me by David Small, economist at the Board of Governors. Transcripts of meetings from March 26, 1976, through January 5, 1978, not yet publicly available, were purchased in hard copy from the Papers of Arthur Burns, University of Michigan.
    Minutes of the Board of Governors concerning the discount rate between1979 and 1987, the discussion of Mexico in 1982, Continental Illinois between 1982 and 1985, and the Bankers Trust commercial paper discussions between 1979 and 1987 were all received in redacted form based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
    Documents from the National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, were located at my request by Thomas Culbert, Aviation Information Research Corporation. David Small, economist at the Board of Governors, also provided copies of selected documents from the National Archives.
Interviews
    Direct quotes in the text attributed to Paul Volcker come either from published material, in which case the document is cited, or from personal interviews I conducted with him, in which case they are labeled PIPAV (Personal Interviews with Paul A. Volcker). Forty-two interviews, which lasted between one and three hours, were conducted between August 2008 and September 2011, and were recorded. Some discussions were not recorded, and our telephone conversations were not recorded.
    I conducted personal interviews with