Paul Volcker

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Paul Volcker bigraphy, stories - American economist

Paul Volcker : biography

05 September 1927 –

Paul Adolph Volcker, Jr. (born September 5, 1927) is an American economist. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve under United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987. He is widely credited with ending the high levels of inflation seen in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. He was the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama from February 2009 until January 2011."Obama Names Volcker to Head New Economic Panel" , Accessed November 26, 2008.

Early life

Volcker was born in Cape May, New Jersey, the son of Alma Louise (née Klippel) and Paul Adolph Volcker.http://books.google.com/books?id=pVu0bYT-Ef4C&pg=PA92&dq=alma+KLIPPEL+VOLCKER&hl=en#v=onepage&q=alma%20KLIPPEL%20VOLCKER&f=falsehttp://www.teaneck.org/virtualvillage/Manager/volcker2.html All of his grandparents were German immigrants. Volcker grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, where his father was the township’s first municipal manager. As a child, he attended his mother’s Lutheran church, while his father went to an Episcopal church. Volcker graduated from Teaneck High School in 1945.Treaster, Joseph B. . Retrieved July 6, 2007."Donald W. Maloney, another Teaneck High School graduate, entered Princeton along with Volcker. Although they had been in the same homeroom at Teaneck High for several years and had been high achievers, they had not been especially close."

Volcker’s undergraduate education was at Princeton University; he graduated in 1949. He earned his M.A. in political economy from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Public Administration in 1951 and then attended the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1952 as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellow, under the Rotary’s Ambassadorial Scholarships program.

Volcker has received honorary degrees from several educational institutions including: Hamilton College (1980), University of Notre Dame, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, New York University, University of Delaware, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Bryant College, Adelphi University, Lamar University, Bates College (1989), Fairfield University (1994), Williams College (2003),http://president.williams.edu/honorary-degrees/?ffp=2 Northwestern University (2004), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005), Brown University (2006), Georgetown University (2007), (2008), Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada (2009), and Amherst College (2011).https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2011/05/node/311439

Personal life

Volcker married Barbara Bahnson, the daughter of a physician, on September 11, 1954. They had two children, Janice, a nurse and a Georgetown University graduate, and James, a research assistant and a New York University graduate who was born with cerebral palsy, as well as four grandchildren.

Volcker is an avid fly-fisherman, who recounted in 1987, "The greatest strategic error of my adult life was to take my wife to Maine on our honeymoon on a fly-fishing trip." Volcker is also known as "Tall Paul" for his height of ,Freeland, Chrystia (April 11, 2008). Man in the News: Paul Volcker. Financial Times. Retrieved on 2008-11-27 from http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041120081500308382. standing exactly a foot (30 cm) taller than his first wife, Barbara, when they first met. She died on June 14, 1998, having suffered from lifelong diabetes, as well as rheumatoid arthritis.

Over Thanksgiving, 2009, he became engaged to marry Anke Dening, a long-time assistant. They married in February 2010.Caren Bohan, Kristina Cooke: , (March 12, 2010)

Post-Federal Reserve

After leaving the Federal Reserve in 1987, he became chairman of the prominent New York investment banking firm, Wolfensohn & Co., a corporate advisory and investment firm run by James D. Wolfensohn (who later became president of the World Bank).

In 1996, he took up the chair of the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons (Volcker Commission) to look into the dormant accounts of Jewish victims of the Holocaust lying in Swiss banks. This included a “massive accounting of Swiss bank records.” In the midst of a contentious process (the committee was formed by three Jewish representatives and three representatives of Swiss banks), he was able to bring about an agreement among the parties for a settlement of $1.25 billion.Treaster (2004), p. x.