2018.10.30 保罗-沃尔克的全能美元指南

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BUSINESS
Paul Volcker’s Guide to the Almighty Dollar
The former chairman of the Federal Reserve has three fundamental rules: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.

By Charles R. Morris

Jim Young / Reuters
OCTOBER 30, 2018
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Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp.

We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government—about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America.


Keeping at It, written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in London, where he focused on the operations of the Bank of England. For the next 20 years, his career cycled between the U.S. Treasury and the Chase Manhattan Bank, with a particular focus on monetary affairs.

Few Americans had heard of Volcker until he was nominated, in 1979, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by President Jimmy Carter, a post he held for the next eight years. During that time, he almost single-handedly pulled the nation back from a near-Weimar-scale financial collapse. If there were a Nobel Prize for government service, Paul Volcker’s name would surely be on the short list.

Volcker’s career spanned nearly the entire postwar era. World War II had ended with the United States effectively controlling the major part of the world’s wealth. In a supreme act of statesmanship, Washington offered to provide trade credits and other aid to allies and former enemies alike, so long as they adopted reasonably democratic values. The American dollar effectively became the world’s currency at its 1934 peg—$35 per ounce of gold. That worked splendidly while America’s allies were in recovery mode, but by the 1960s most industrialized countries were competitive with the United States. Swiss currency traders, the nefarious “gnomes of Zurich,” realized that America’s gold reserves could no longer support its dollar issuance. So they started testing the dollar with sudden spasms of dollar sales in the hope of forcing a devaluation.


The classic method of meeting an attack on a currency is to raise interest rates to increase the attractiveness of holding it. But this was the early 1960s, and John F. Kennedy had promised to “get this country moving again.” Higher interest rates would have scuttled that ambition. The Treasury Department hit on a temporizing solution: a tax on foreign security purchases to curb the foreign traders’ enthusiasm for holding dollars. Volcker, then a deputy undersecretary at Treasury, drafted the enabling legislation. It did not take long, however, for traders to engineer an end run around the new tax by simply keeping their dollars overseas. Thus was born the “Eurodollar,” which would proliferate wildly, quite out of the control of the Federal Reserve.

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Volcker returned to Chase for several years before rejoining Treasury as undersecretary for monetary affairs in the Nixon administration. The war in Vietnam—paid for by deficit spending rather than new taxes—had triggered serious inflation. Oil imports were surging, and currency traders smelled blood. But Richard Nixon had a genius for the bold stroke. Along with John Connally, his outsize Treasury secretary, Nixon in August 1971 brought virtually his entire economics team to Camp David, where he announced that he would cut taxes, impose wage and price controls, levy a tax surcharge on all imports, and rescind the commitment to redeem dollars in gold. In his 1975 book, Before the Fall, Nixon’s über-speechwriter, William Safire, recalled, “Volcker was undergoing an especially searing experience; he was schooled in the international monetary system, almost bred to defend it.” Everyone he had worked with “trusted each other in crisis to respect the rules and cling to the few constants like the convertibility of gold.” Volcker was charged with drafting the announcement of Nixon’s new economic policies, but his moroseness showed through. Safire did the final draft, proclaiming “a triumph and a fresh start.” About Volcker himself, Safire wrote, “It was not a happy weekend for him.”

As the ’70s wound down, the dollar became a debased currency—but one that, for want of an alternative, still served as the world’s most important reserve currency. Nations might make other provisions, but that could take years. To make matters worse, an ideological cleavage between Milton Friedman’s “freshwater” Chicago monetarists and East and West Coast “saltwater” economists added an unusual testiness to the board’s discussions. Monetarists looked to the supply of money, which is the multiple of physical money—M1 in the jargon—times its velocity, or turnover rate. Friedman’s rigid version of monetarism assumed that the velocity of money was fairly stable over time, so policy makers could ignore it and steer solely by M1. (Indeed, Friedman also believed that you could eliminate the Federal Reserve Board.) Traditionalists, such as Volcker and most other saltwater economists, looked first to interest rates as a policy tool.

By the time Volcker was sworn in at the Fed, in 1979, inflation in the U.S. was running about 1 percent a month, and rising. In 1973, the OPEC countries had forsaken the hallowed $3 peg for a barrel of oil—tripling their prices and tripling them again six years later. By then, spot prices for gold were bouncing around from $235 to $578 per ounce. When the U.S. Treasury, in the early 1980s, needed to raise money, it would be forced to float bond issues in marks and yen, so far had the almighty dollar fallen.

Two months into his new job, Volcker attended a conference of central bankers in Belgrade and was shocked to find himself harangued by his peers. As he explains in his memoir, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was a friend, lectured Volcker for almost an hour “about waffling American policymakers who had let inflation run amok and undermined confidence in the dollar.” A shaken Volcker cut his trip short, got his fellow Fed members on board, and called an unusual evening press conference. Most dramatically, he stressed that he was shifting his key policy tool to monetarism. As a hedge, he also raised the Fed’s discount rate by a full point. The New York Times editorialized about the rate hike under the headline “Mr. Volcker’s Verdun,” noting that when it came to holding the line on inflation, the Fed chairman’s message echoed that of Marshal Pétain: “They shall not pass.”

At first, the experiment seemed to work. The objective was to reduce the money supply and thereby bring down prices. By January 1980, however, the numbers were going haywire. Perversely, inflation took off—it reached an annual rate of almost 15 percent. The Fed’s technical staff ruefully admitted that Friedman’s money-supply theory was not precise enough to form a basis for effective policy. The Fed board maintained its monetarist rhetoric, but Volcker shifted back to raising interest rates in order to wring inflation from the economy. This was language that all businesspeople understood. The bank prime rate eventually jumped to 21.5 percent, T-bills hit 17 percent, and prime mortgages were at 18 percent. Those rates were the highest the country had ever seen. Volcker went on a grueling speaking tour to bolster the case for what he was doing.

By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in 1981, the U.S. economy had slipped into a deep recession, one for which the Volcker Shock was largely blamed. Unemployment neared 11 percent. Volcker became a target of popular anger. One welcome ray of sunshine came from the White House, with Reagan giving full support to the continuation of Volcker’s program. (Volcker later said, “I don’t kiss men, but I was tempted.”) Another came from the American Home Builders Association, in early 1982. Its industry had been badly hit by the recession, but Volcker gave a tough speech to the association about staying the course against inflation, and was amazed to get a standing ovation.

Inflation—blessedly—broke in mid-1982. The second half of the year saw a flat consumer price index. Real GDP for 1983 was a very respectable 4.6 percent and  a blistering 7.2  in 1984. By 1986 annual inflation had come down to only 2 percent. The crisis was effectively over. After 1982, Americans enjoyed the lowest interest rates (with a blip here and there) among the major industrial countries, and interest rates are low to this day. The second half of the 1990s was one of the most prosperous periods in history—there was a twin boom in high technology and in housing. Volcker attributes the crash that came in both industries to the same “greed and grasping” he cited when we spoke.


Volcker served two terms as the chairman of the Fed, giving way to Alan Greenspan in 1987. By that time, the challenges confronting the Fed had moved to new arenas—like the reckless “oil lending” by the big American banks to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and a string of smaller countries. In Keeping at It, Volcker writes, “Looking back, I see Latin America today as a sad culmination of hard-fought, constructive efforts to deal with a debt crisis that, aided and abetted by reckless bank lending practices, grew out of a chronic absence of suitably disciplined economic policies.” Volcker will never escape a Fed-inflected prose style, but his assessment is spot-on.

Retirement has treated Volcker well. He did some teaching and loved it. He spent 10 contented years as the chief executive of Wolfensohn & Company, an old-fashioned investment bank, which mostly gave advice on mergers and acquisitions. When he retired, he had plenty of time for nonprofit activities and was much in demand. He chaired inquiries into the ownership of Jewish art sequestered in Swiss bank vaults; the massive theft from food and medical programs after the Iraq War; and corruption in the World Bank.

Volcker also played an important role in the cleanup after the 2008–2009 crash. His advice was widely solicited, if not always followed. In his memoir, he describes sitting at a conference and listening to bankers warn that new regulations must not inhibit trading and “innovation.” He finally exploded: “Wake up, gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information.” His lasting contribution from this period is the so-called Volcker Rule, which bars traders from taking risky positions with depositors’ funds, and which he summarizes as “Thou shall not gamble with the public’s money.”


Read more: Wall Street has basically the same culture that led to the 2008 crash.

Keeping at It is not a tell-all book. Volcker’s subject matter is economic policy, and his praise or criticism is almost entirely directed at specific ideas and actions. His first wife, Barbara Bahnson, died in 1998. In 2010, he married his longtime assistant, Anke Dening. There is not much of a personal nature in the book, and yet, unwittingly, it paints an accurate personal portrait. The picture that emerges is of a man of granitic integrity, committed to what he perceives as wise policies—committed, that is, to what he calls The Verities: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.

The secret of Paul Volcker was his father. Paul Adolph Volcker Sr. was almost as tall as his son. He was an engineer, with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he went on to become a city manager. The city he was most identified with was Teaneck, New Jersey, a municipality that had fallen prey to a corrupt political machine. It was the kind of challenge that Paul Sr. leaped at. In his son’s memoir, Paul Sr. is always working; even after a long day, he drove around his modest empire and made note of broken traffic lights, spilled garbage, and other petty violations. They were not petty to him. The city fathers once tried to can him for hiring a professional police chief. They couldn’t fire him, but they could stop paying him. Paul Sr. went to court and got his pay—and got his police chief. Exactly what his son would have done.


There are few people like Paul Volcker in the U.S. government today, or in business, for that matter—respected and trusted by everyone, whatever the disagreements, and motivated by public service. Volcker reveled in his middle-class status. He notes in his memoir that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Washington was “mostly populated by middle-class professionals, including families of civil servants and members of Congress,” and that “there wasn’t great wealth.” Now, he writes, Washington is “dominated by wealth” and by “lobbyists who are joined at the hip” with people in government, whether on the Hill or in the executive branch.

As a result, he says simply, “I stay away.”

Charles R. Morris is the author of 15 books, including The Trillion-Dollar Meltdown, a Loeb prize winner, and, most recently, A Rabble of Dead Money, a history of the Great Depression. His books have been translated into 18 languages.




保罗-沃尔克的全能美元指南
这位前美联储主席有三条基本规则：稳定的价格、健全的财政和良好的政府。

作者：查尔斯-R-莫里斯

吉姆-杨/路透社
2018年10月30日

最近我在曼哈顿上东区的公寓里与保罗-沃尔克交谈时，他6英尺7英寸高的身躯披在一张贵妃椅上。他已经91岁了，而且病得很重，他很容易疲惫。但他的声音依然粗犷，他的大脑依然敏锐。

我们谈到了他即将出版的回忆录《坚持下去》。追求健全的货币和良好的政府--关于他为什么写这本书以及他希望传授的经验。沃尔克不是一个虚荣的人，但他知道他的公共生活是有影响的，他希望后人能把它写对。他也不讳言。在我们的谈话中，他抨击了银行和企业领导层的 "贪婪和攫取"，以及美国收入分配的严重倾斜。


与彭博社编辑克里斯蒂娜-哈珀（Christine Harper）共同撰写的《坚持下去》（Keeping at It）主要记录了保罗-沃尔克的公共生活，他是在全球金融的稀薄空气中度过的。1949年从普林斯顿大学毕业后，他在哈佛大学学习经济学，然后在伦敦学习，在那里他专注于英格兰银行的运作。在接下来的20年里，他的职业生涯在美国财政部和大通曼哈顿银行之间循环往复，特别关注货币事务。

很少有美国人听说过沃尔克，直到他在1979年被吉米-卡特总统提名为联邦储备委员会主席，他在接下来的八年里一直担任这一职务。在此期间，他几乎以一己之力将国家从接近魏玛时代的金融崩溃中拉了回来。如果有一个针对政府服务的诺贝尔奖，保罗-沃尔克的名字肯定会出现在短名单上。

沃尔克的职业生涯几乎跨越了整个战后时代。第二次世界大战结束后，美国有效地控制了世界财富的主要部分。在一个至高无上的政治家行为中，华盛顿提出向盟友和前敌人提供贸易信贷和其他援助，只要他们采用合理的民主价值观。美国美元在1934年以每盎司黄金35美元的汇率有效地成为世界货币。当美国的盟友处于复苏状态时，这种做法非常有效，但到了20世纪60年代，大多数工业化国家都与美国竞争。瑞士货币交易商，即邪恶的 "苏黎世侏儒"，意识到美国的黄金储备不能再支持其美元的发行。因此，他们开始用突然痉挛的美元销售来测试美元，希望能迫使其贬值。


应对货币受到攻击的经典方法是提高利率以增加持有货币的吸引力。但这是20世纪60年代初，约翰-F-肯尼迪曾承诺 "让这个国家再次前进"。更高的利率会使这一雄心壮志化为泡影。财政部找到了一个临时性的解决方案：对外国证券购买征税，以抑制外国交易者对持有美元的热情。时任财政部副部长的沃尔克起草了授权立法。然而，没过多久，交易员们就设计了一个绕过新税的办法，只是把他们的美元留在海外。因此，"欧洲美元 "诞生了，它将疯狂地扩散，完全不受美联储的控制。

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沃尔克回到大通银行工作了几年，然后重新加入财政部，在尼克松政府中担任负责货币事务的副部长。越南战争--由赤字支出而不是新的税收支付--引发了严重的通货膨胀。石油进口激增，货币交易商闻到了血腥味。但是，理查德-尼克松有一个大胆出手的天才。1971年8月，尼克松与他的大人物财政部长约翰-康纳利一起，带着他的整个经济团队来到戴维营，在那里他宣布，他将减税，实行工资和价格控制，对所有进口商品征收附加税，并取消用黄金赎回美元的承诺。尼克松的超级演讲家威廉-萨菲尔（William Safire）在其1975年出版的《堕落之前》（Before the Fall）一书中回忆说："沃尔克正在经历一次特别痛苦的经历；他在国际货币体系中接受过教育，几乎是为了捍卫它而长大的。与他共事的每个人都 "在危机中相互信任，尊重规则，坚持少数不变的东西，如黄金的可兑换性。" 沃尔克负责起草尼克松新经济政策的公告，但他的低沉表现得很明显。萨菲尔做了最后的草案，宣布 "一个胜利和一个新的开始"。关于沃尔克本人，萨菲尔写道："这对他来说不是一个快乐的周末。"

随着70年代的结束，美元成为一种贬值的货币--但由于缺乏替代物，它仍然是世界上最重要的储备货币。各国可能会做出其他规定，但这可能需要多年时间。更糟糕的是，米尔顿-弗里德曼的 "淡水 "芝加哥货币主义者和东西海岸的 "咸水 "经济学家之间的意识形态分歧给董事会的讨论增添了不寻常的考验。货币主义者关注的是货币供应量，也就是实物货币的倍数--M1的行话--乘以其速度，或周转率。弗里德曼的僵化版本的货币主义认为，货币的速度随着时间的推移是相当稳定的，所以政策制定者可以忽略它，只通过M1来引导。(事实上，弗里德曼还认为，你可以取消联邦储备委员会）。传统主义者，如沃尔克和其他大多数咸水经济学家，首先将利率作为一种政策工具。

到1979年沃尔克在美联储宣誓就职时，美国的通货膨胀率每月约为1%，而且还在上升。1973年，欧佩克国家放弃了神圣的每桶石油3美元的挂钩价格，使其价格翻了三倍，六年后又翻了三倍。那时，黄金的现货价格在每盎司235美元到578美元之间跳动。在20世纪80年代初，当美国财政部需要筹集资金时，它将被迫以马克和日元发行债券，因为万能的美元已经跌到了极点。

沃尔克上任两个月后，参加了在贝尔格莱德举行的中央银行家会议，他震惊地发现自己受到了同行们的嘲讽。正如他在回忆录中解释的那样，作为朋友的德国总理赫尔穆特-施密特(Helmut Schmidt)对沃尔克进行了近一个小时的演讲，"谈论那些摇摆不定的美国政策制定者，他们让通货膨胀肆虐，破坏了对美元的信心。" 受到打击的沃尔克缩短了行程，让他的美联储成员加入进来，并召开了一次不同寻常的晚间新闻发布会。最引人注目的是，他强调他正在将他的关键政策工具转向货币主义。作为对冲措施，他还将美联储的贴现率提高了整整一个点。纽约时报》以 "沃尔克先生的凡尔登 "为题对加息发表了社论，指出当涉及到对通货膨胀的控制时，美联储主席的信息与贝当元帅的信息一致："他们不会通过。"

起初，这个实验似乎是有效的。其目的是减少货币供应量，从而降低价格。然而，到了1980年1月，这些数字开始变得不正常。反常的是，通胀率上升了，达到了近15%的年增长率。美联储的技术人员沮丧地承认，弗里德曼的货币供应量理论不够精确，不足以构成有效政策的基础。美联储董事会坚持其货币主义的言论，但沃尔克又转向提高利率，以便从经济中榨取通货膨胀。这是所有商业人士都能理解的语言。银行最优惠利率最终跃升至21.5%，T-bills达到17%，最优惠抵押贷款为18%。这些利率是这个国家有史以来最高的。沃尔克进行了艰苦的巡回演讲，以支持他正在做的事情。

到1981年罗纳德-里根就职时，美国经济已经陷入了严重的衰退，沃尔克冲击在很大程度上被归咎于此。失业率接近11%。沃尔克成为民众愤怒的目标。一缕可喜的阳光来自于白宫，里根全力支持沃尔克计划的继续实施。(沃尔克后来说，"我不亲吻男人，但我被诱惑了。"）另一束阳光来自1982年初的美国房屋建筑商协会。其行业受到了经济衰退的严重打击，但沃尔克向协会发表了关于坚持抗击通货膨胀的严厉演讲，并惊讶地获得了起立鼓掌的机会。

通货膨胀--幸好--在1982年中期爆发了。这一年的下半年，消费者价格指数持平。1983年的实际国内生产总值是非常可观的4.6%，1984年是惊人的7.2%。到1986年，年度通货膨胀率已经下降到只有2%。危机实际上已经结束。1982年后，美国人在主要工业国家中享有最低的利率（这里和那里有一个小插曲），而且利率至今仍然很低。20世纪90年代后半期是历史上最繁荣的时期之一--高科技和住房领域出现了双重繁荣。沃尔克将这两个行业出现的崩溃归因于他在我们谈话时提到的 "贪婪和抓取"。


沃尔克担任了两届美联储主席，在1987年让位给艾伦-格林斯潘。那时，美联储面临的挑战已经转移到了新的领域，比如美国大银行对墨西哥、巴西、阿根廷和一连串小国不计后果的 "石油借贷"。沃尔克在《坚持下去》中写道："回顾过去，我认为今天的拉丁美洲是艰苦卓绝的建设性努力的结果，这些努力是为了应对债务危机，而这场危机在不计后果的银行贷款行为的帮助和怂恿下，因长期缺乏适当的纪律性经济政策而产生。沃尔克永远无法摆脱美联储的散文风格，但他的评价是准确的。

退休后的沃尔克待遇不错。他做过一些教学工作，并且很喜欢。他作为沃尔芬森公司（Wolfensohn & Company）的首席执行官度过了10年满足的时光，这是一家老式的投资银行，主要提供兼并和收购方面的建议。当他退休后，他有很多时间从事非营利活动，而且需求量很大。他主持了对被封存在瑞士银行金库的犹太艺术品所有权的调查；伊拉克战争后食品和医疗项目的大规模盗窃；以及世界银行的腐败。

沃尔克还在2008-2009年金融危机后的清理工作中发挥了重要作用。他的建议被广泛征求，尽管并不总是被采纳。在他的回忆录中，他描述了坐在一个会议上，听银行家们警告说，新的法规不能抑制交易和 "创新"。他终于爆发了。"醒醒吧，先生们。我只能说，你们的回应是不充分的。我希望有人能给我一些关于最近金融创新和经济增长之间关系的中立证据，只要有一丝信息就可以了。" 他在这一时期的持久贡献是所谓的沃尔克规则，该规则禁止交易员用储户的资金进行风险头寸，他将其概括为 "你不得用公众的钱进行赌博"。


阅读更多。华尔街拥有导致2008年崩溃的基本相同的文化。

坚守》并不是一本告诉大家的书。沃尔克的主题是经济政策，他的赞美或批评几乎完全针对具体的想法和行动。他的第一任妻子Barbara Bahnson于1998年去世。2010年，他与他的长期助理Anke Dening结婚。书中没有太多个人性质的内容，然而，不知不觉中，它描绘了一幅准确的个人肖像。出现的画面是一个正直的人，致力于他认为明智的政策--致力于他所谓的真理：稳定的价格、健全的财政和良好的政府。

保罗-沃尔克的秘密是他的父亲。老保罗-阿道夫-沃尔克几乎和他儿子一样高。他是一名工程师，拥有伦斯勒理工学院的学位，他后来成为一名城市经理。他最认同的城市是新泽西州的蒂内克市，一个被腐败的政治机器所害的城市。这是老保罗跃跃欲试的一种挑战。在他儿子的回忆录中，老保罗总是在工作；即使是在漫长的一天之后，他也会开车在他那不大的帝国里转悠，记下破损的交通灯、洒落的垃圾和其他小的违规行为。对他来说，这些都不是小事。城市的父老们曾经试图因为他雇用了一个专业的警察局长而把他罐死。他们不能解雇他，但他们可以停止支付他。老保罗上了法庭，得到了他的工资，也得到了他的警察局长。这正是他儿子会做的事。


在今天的美国政府，或在商界，很少有像保罗-沃尔克这样的人--无论有什么分歧，都受到大家的尊重和信任，并以公共服务为动力。沃尔克陶醉于他的中产阶级身份。他在回忆录中指出，在20世纪60年代和70年代，华盛顿 "大部分是中产阶级专业人士，包括公务员和国会议员的家庭"，而且 "没有什么大的财富"。他写道，现在，华盛顿 "被财富所支配"，"游说者与政府人员紧密联系在一起"，无论是在国会还是在行政部门。

因此，他简单地说，"我远离"。

查尔斯-R-莫里斯是15本书的作者，包括获得勒布奖的《万亿美元的崩溃》，以及最近的《死钱的狂欢》，一部大萧条的历史。他的书已被翻译成18种语言。