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Tue, Oct 23, 2018 – 11:45 PM
Paul Volcker, 91, the towering Federal Reserve chief who defeated inflation – literally towering, he is a few inches shy of seven feet tall – laments the breakdown of governance and policymaking.
"We're in a mess in every direction," Mr Volcker told The New York Times.
"Polarization between (and even within) political parties, accompanied by the ever-growing influence of highly concentrated wealth," he said in the introduction to his book, "Keeping at It."
And Mr Volcker told the newspaper he worries that "we're developing into a plutocracy."
"We've got a huge number of people who are so rich that they're smart because they're smart and constructive, and they do not like government, and they do not like to pay taxes."
In the book due out October 30, he stressed that "no force on earth" can long resist "the thousands of dollars and millions of dollars in the Washington DC swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process."
This has undermined governance, leading to the decline of "cautious budgeting," such as even "needs to self-evident as rebuilding our infrastructure seem, for all the talk, beyond our capacity for action," Mr Volcker wrote.
He points to the growth of the government and the failure of policymakers, as the failure to "recognize the costs of open markets and rapid innovation to sizable fractions of our own citizenry," and the belief that "inventive financial markets could discipline themselves."
President Donald Trump was able to capitalize on those fears because he "seized upon some issues that the elite had ignored," Volcker said in the interview.
AFP
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