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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (672168)	2/14/2005 2:52:05 PM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

It would appear that Volcker is in it up to his eyeballs...Read this...look appointed him.. From Carter to Reagan INTERVIEWER: In your position at the Fed, you were extraordinarily independent. Not many countries' central bankers are quite that independent. Do you think President Carter regretted appointing you? PAUL VOLCKER: I don't know. I haven't asked him that question directly; he'd probably be polite and answer ["no"]. But he's never really criticized me publicly. I'm sure it made him uneasy. He kind of [appeared uneasy] on one campaign appearance, but only one campaign appearance. I once asked him whether I cost him the election, and he smiled and said there were a few other influences as well. And let us not forget about the Iranian hostages and so forth. INTERVIEWER: What was President Reagan's stance toward what you were doing? PAUL VOLCKER: I saw him from time to time, but I was not a close intimate of President Reagan's. His entourage in the White House, or certainly in the Treasury, were very critical at times. They were... kind of a funny mixture. They had monetarist doctrine, supply-side doctrine, libertarian doctrine all mixed together, so some of it wasn't terribly coherent, which helped me a bit. There was unhappiness because there was a big recession early in his term, and things were not really stable. But he himself never criticized me directly in public, certainly. I always had the feeling that he was urged to do so. [It seemed] that every time he had a press conference somebody was urging him to take a slap at the Federal Reserve, but he never did, and I don't know why. I speculate that he was not a highly sophisticated economist. I'm sure he didn't understand all the arguments his own people were giving him. He did understand that he didn't like inflation, and I think he had some kind of a feeling that the Federal Reserve was trying to deal with inflation. INTERVIEWER: In the late years, was there a Reagan revolution? PAUL VOLCKER: I think there was a Reagan revolution in terms of the cutting edge of this moving back from this feeling that [if] you've got a problem, the government would answer it. Here's a big brother here to help you, as Mr. Reagan used to mock, but if it's true that we needed some cutting back in this exuberant view of government, which I happened to share, he certainly did it with some vigor. He did it in a way that helped restore the confidence of America in America, which had been lost, or at least greatly eroded, during the 1970s. INTERVIEWER: Was the air traffic controllers' strike a watershed? PAUL VOLCKER: Yes, I think it was, and that's not often appreciated. One of the major factors in turning the tide on the inflationary situation was the controllers' strike, because here, for the first time, it wasn't really a fight about wages; it was a fight about working conditions. It was directly a wage problem, but the controllers were government employees, and the government didn't back down. And he stood there and said, "If you're going to go on strike, you're going to lose your job, and we'll make out without you." That had a profound effect on the aggressiveness of labor at that time, in the midst of this inflationary problem and other economic problems. I am told that the administration pretty much took off the shelf plans that had been developed in the Carter administration, but whether the Carter administration ever would of done it is the open question. That was something of a watershed.