Paul Vulker is a giant of global finance, literally and figuratively. At six ft seven inches or about two meters tall, he towered over most everyone around him, and as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the nineteen eighties and in countless other roles in public service, he made his mark on the world. Now, at age ninety one, he's published a new memoir called Keeping at It, and his collaborator happens to be one of our Bloomberg colleagues, Christine Harper. This week on Benchmark, we'll talk with Christine about why he wrote the book and what it was like to work with him. Welcome to Benchmark. I'm Scott Landman, economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington, and now I'm Daniel Moss, columnist at Bloomberg Opinion in New York. Were joined by Christine Kappa, editor of Bloomberg Markets the same She's been a reporter and editor with Bloomberg for twenty years. I first met Christine in the early aughts in the London office, when she was wrestling with stories about Merrill Lynch's bond desk. We're recording this on Tuesday. The book Keeping at It should be available wherever you buy good books. Christine, welcome to Benchmark. Thanks for having me. It's a it's a pleasure, Christine. Congratulations on the book. How did you come to work with Paul Wolker on it? Well, it really does a hugely lucky break. Unlike the two of you, I'm not an economics expert, as you know, I have been covering the financial industry here for a long time at Bloomberg, and I happen to know a man named Peter Osenos who runs a publishing firm called Public Affairs. He's quite close to Paul Volker, having having published Mr Walker's book in h called Changing Fortunes. So Peter called me up one day and said that Paul Wolker was interested in writing a memoir. But at that point he was a vettor ninety and Peter, who's been in publishing for a long time, thought it might make sense to have somebody work with him, And it might make most sense if it was somebody in New York City who could easily get back and forth to Paul's office and um to his home to work with him. So was I interested, and I said, let me think about it for one day and pretty quickly realized this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Even though I had never written a book and I was an expert economics, I couldn't imagine there was any downside and getting to spend time with Paul Walker and learned all his stories and just see what that was like. So, um, that's what I did. And uh, and I think Peter's view was that there'd be some kind of chemistry that we would work well together. I'm not really sure why he had that insight, but it proved to be correct. Paul didn't know me from Adam. When he was introduced to me, he immediately was very friendly and very willing to work with me, and we started having regular meetings where I would record these interviews with him, with the thought being that I would eventually take the transcripts and blend them all into a book. But of course, you know, even though he was kind of in and out of the hospital with various health issues, he ended up started churning out pages and pages on a yellow pad of basically the manuscript and having his assistant typed them up. And I looked at them and said, well, these are really good. Keep going. So I would get these emailed files his assistant would you know, send them along to me, and I would work with Paul and them and he was just great. And I kept waiting for him to become in some way, you know, difficult to our dolimineering or stubborn or something, and he was. He never was. We just had a great time. I never went to a meeting with him, and we we we've been meeting now for more than a year, several times a week. I never left a meeting with him not feeling happier than when I went into it. He's just a wonderful guy. And I learned so much every every meeting. Okay, now, twice in that answer, you've mentioned that you're not an economics expert. You don't have a background in economics. I think you're selling yourself a little short here. You have run finance reporting at Bloomberg News. But to the core of that question, did that make your role easier or harder not having formal qualifications in economics. I think it was probably a little bit of both. So I I didn't have the familiarity with some of the um stories that both of you I'm sure would have had, so I had to do more research to understand them. But I also sort of forced him to explain things that maybe somebody who was very comfortable with economics wouldn't have needed explained and might have been just more willing to fall into sort of a jargony insider voice. Um. That said, he his natural inclination is to be pretty plain spoken. So a lot of the out of the book is very readable just because he writes in a very readable way. He doesn't like to um to use jargon. He really doesn't. I mean, I don't. I don't know if can I tell the story about how we came up with the title. Okay, So we really struggled with the title, and it was very telling about him because but we were coming up with all these titles that sounded like, you know, the titles of a great man's book, you know, um, Mr Chairman, and you know, things with great sort of august themes, and he couldn't stand that. He really was opposed to anything that sounded pompous. He didn't want anything like, for instance, Ben Bernanke's book The Courage to Act. He was allergic to that type of tone in his in in a book title. So we kept going back and forth, and there's a story if you read the book that he starts out with a joke, and the joke is about a parent. And so he wanted the title to be, and he was quite serious with this. He wanted the title to be The Wise Parrot Speaks, and the publisher and I and everybody around him sort of said, well, that's very funny, but I don't think anybody will understand it. They don't really necessarily recognize what that's about. And he said, yeah, but that'll that'll intrigue people. People buy it anyway. So we had a lot of we had a lot of discussion that this was probably the most difficult thing. And then finally one day I said, well, there's this phrase in some of the minutes sustained commitment, which I think sort of sums up your description of your life and you're fighting against inflation. And he looked at me and said, keeping at it, and I realized, like, that's the simplest way to say sustained commitment. So that's that became the title. So he gave up on The Wise Parrot Speaks, and UH gracefully suggested the title that we have now. Um, I'm glad to hear that. I'm curious also, Christine, you know some more about the collaboration process that you were starting to go into. Yeah. I think he refers to in his book that that that you were checking and rechecking some of his anecdotes. I mean, as someone in his forties now, I think it would be difficult for me to write my own memoir. And yet at age he was recalling things from his childhood, you know, all sorts of events early in his life, a lot of his work life in the fifties, in sixties at the Treasury and and the Fed. How were you able to, you know, to flesh out some of these stories that he told. Well, one thing that's so remarkable about his life is almost every chapter there are stories that have entire books written about them. So my my home office right now is stacked from from Florida ceiling with various books, which in many cases are just to sort of do more research on a few paragraphs in one chapter of his book. So you know, I just wentn't to find any kind of source material, I shood there are a lot of it was and you if you look at the notes, a lot of it is looking back at news articles from the time. You know, there are great archives on the New York Times website, for instance, which really help, and then newspapers dot com things like that where you can find news articles about events as they were happening, and that's that was a pretty helpful way to check things. Many people would recognize Vulcar as the central banker that broke the back of inflation, of course in the United States. How comfortable is he with this kind of canonization, Well, I he appreciates that, with the fact that people um sometimes still come up to him on the street and thank him for what he did, He's humbled by it, but he's grateful, and he feels so strongly about serving the country that to know that he's done something that people feel made a difference, I think matters a lot to him. I think he's constantly coming up with new things he wants to fix in the country, and he's also quite humble about ways in which he failed to do things. I mean, there's a lot of the beginning of the book is about his failure to basically create an international monetary system, and once Breton Woods broke down and he was really he was really upset about that. So um, there's a combination in the book of I think him telling the sort of heroic story of Paul Wolker, which you can't avoid but admit is heroic in many respects, but also being quite self critical at points. He doesn't always come off as an amazing superhero. Do circumstances create the man or does the man shape the circumstances. Would anyone serving as chair of the FADE, given the inflation landscape at the time, have taken the steps he took. Well, that's interesting thing that he likes to talk about. So obviously he followed two FED chairman who didn't take the action that was required. When he was brought in, the problem was so acute that he felt that he had great support in doing things that were very difficult. So he he does sort of admit that as much as he gets credit for being strong and fighting back against politicians who wanted to impeach him, he always felt there was this reserve of public support from him because things had gotten so bad and they were at such a point of crisis. So Um, however, I mean, he did have to be very clever and how he did that, and there's a section and how he where he describes the decision to target the money supply as effectively sort of lashing the FED to the mast. They had no choice but to follow through, and that inoculated him against some criticisms because he could say, we're just looking at the money supply. We're sorry, he and he admits if if he had ever been told interest rates were going to go up, he might have just run away immediately, but he sort of he sort of created a system where he almost had had an ability and the Fed had ability to say, it's out of our hands. We're just we're just looking at something else. Interest rates are not under our control anymore. We'll get back to the issue of targets in a minute. It seems like Christine that you know, there are so many interesting stories about his early life and his childhood, and one of them in there may even have informed his thinking when he was at the FED in the late seventies without him even knowing it. And it seems like it that that comes from his mother's economics textbook that he found from all the way back in nineteen eleven and the notes she wrote in the margins. Can you tell us a little bit about that part of the story. Yeah, this is this is this was an amazing discovery. I mean, we talked a lot in the book about his father and they influence his father and his father's career in public service had on Paul. But what was really interesting was right towards the end when that we already actually put out the Galley version of the book and we're making final corrections to it. I was at his home and I was looking through He has this room with the you know, bookcases all around the room, and I was looking for a book that he said I could find somewhere, and I found another book and it was a tiny, little hard wound volume which was printed in in the early nineteen hundreds. It was it was his his mother's Vasser economics text book from nineteen eleven. It had a lot of her handwriting in it. All all the margins were covered with her handwriting, and including on page eight, I think there was a sentence where she had scrawled economic laws cannot be dependent upon if we disregard psychology, et cetera. And I showed this to him and he was, first of all, he'd just dunfounded, he'd forgotten he had it. It reminded him that his mother had been I guess, really passionate about economics, studying it before the FED was created in nineteen eleven. Anyway, he he had completely forgotten how much his mother cared about economics, and also that people were having this in site about the importance of psychology even before. He sort of feels that he had that insight during his career at the fact, in the understanding that you had to find a simple way to communicate with the public about what you were doing and the money supply with the way to do it. He appointment in nineteen sev nine by Jimmy Carter can also be seen as the start of the quote unquote model an era in central banking. Uh thereafter inflation not so much of a problem, but also the idea of policy and the controversy that it's sometimes courted being associated with a single figure, and it sort of helps that he's this towering guy. Do you think Carter knew what he was getting into when Volka was appointed? How big a job was the Federal Reserve chairman back in the day. Well, he describes how there was a lot of controversy he knows about appointing him, and there was a camp in the Carter White House that was very opposed to appointing him because they recognized he would be independent, they wouldn't be able to control him. He was likely to raise interest rates a lot. That was not going to be good for Carter and his reelection chances. And they were right, But there were obviously other voices that persuaded him. It was important he was going to be popular and Wills read for instance, and and Carter realized the problems were so bad he couldn't get anything done that he had to deal with this inflation problem and basically took a bullet, basically agreed to do this. And it was one of the things that perhaps cost some re election. But yes, so you have this FED chairman who's got the willingness of the President and also his successor, Ronald Reagan, who supported him publicly all the time to do what what needed to be done. And uh, and he did it. And that was a big difference because a lot of other FED chairman had had I mean, Arthur Burns had a great you know, he was very well respected figure, he was very well known, but he just didn't do what was required. Through the eighties when you and I were growing up, there was a narrative that the Carti years were sort of a shorthand for American weakness and American failure. That view, you know, has come into some scrutiny lately, and President Carter looks better with a couple of decades hindsight. How does folk feel about President card Well, so early in our discussions, early in our meetings, he was reading the early version of Stuart Eisenstadt's book about Carter, and there's a big chapter in there about Vulcar and uh, and he was very pleased by that, you know, because Stewart Eisenstadt was one of those people who opposed Vulcar back in the day. He was, you know, more on the liberal wing. He was afraid about high interest rates. But now in hindsight recognized and recognizes that one of the great things that President Carter did was named Paul Wolker. And President Carter has always said that as well. So I think, you know, obviously Paul Wolker loves that, and uh, and I think he really respects Carter and and his willingness to do the difficult things. Um and and sort of the way he also has behaved in his post presidency He sees him as a really great public servant who hasn't quite gotten his due. He recognized this, that he made mistakes, and there are reasons that, you know, Reagan was able to achieve things that Carter wasn't. But you know, I think he considers Carter one of the presidents he admires. For sure. It sounds like he thinks or is still underwrited. Yes, I would say that's true, Christine. In the thirty years since Vulcar left the chairmanship of the FED, he's rarely set still. He served on many public commissions, reparations for Nazi victims, the the Obama uh financial regulation initiative that eventually became the Vulcar Rule. He even expresses some amusement that his name always became attached to these commissions, like the Vulgar Commission, the Vulcar this the Vulgar that does any of these? Do any of these particular roles stand out for him as the most memorable or the most important in his post FED career. Uh? Well, I mean he talks about how pretty much the first thing he left he left to do after leaving the FED was to serve on a national commission for public service, and then he immediately served on another one, and he has devoted his career in the last few years to an organization called the Vulkan Alliance, which is trying to improve public service. So I think that, above all is the thing that he cares about the most. Obviously these other things. Trying to end corruption is incredibly important to him, and he feels very proud of what they did, um with getting some money back for the families of Holocaust victims, um. But you know the thing, that thing that really strikes me about all of that is that he he did a lot of these very difficult, very controversial jobs that required somebody of great integrity, and he wouldn't take money for that. And I sort of mentioned this to him while we were working on the book, that should we mention you didn't take money. He said, now, so we don't even have that in the book. But he he really felt that it was important to do and he didn't want to get renumerated for it. I want to get back to this issue of his chairmanship and the dawn of the modern central bank. I mean, again partly helped by the break of inflation and the fact that Vulcar is physically a very big guy. Do you think that the cult of personality surrounding many central bankers in the world today is a good thing, and more importantly, does Vulca think it's a good thing. Well, I I don't think we ever talked about the cult of personality, but I'll tell you a few things that he said that sort of connected to that. One is that it bothers him that he's sometimes criticized for being having been secretive at the FED. And he will point out that there was one year he testified in front of Congress something like thirty four times. He felt he was on things like the Sunday Morning Meet the Press shows, which you don't see the FED chairman do anymore. He was very out there, So it bothers him that he's sort of sometimes tagged with the secrecy thing. He also feels very strongly that it's helpful to have central bankers who aren't just academic economists. He reserves a little bit of scorn for the academic economists in the book, and things like econometrics he's not a fan of. Well. He talks about how how he was going to get his PhD but kept putting it off and putting it off. Yeah, yeah, he never He never did his dissertation, and he really feels what he what he learned about economics that served him well was understanding the psychology of the market from sitting on the trading desk at the New York FED and from being a chase for two stints in his early career and working in the Treasury department. So he is very supportive of having people at the FED who aren't just academic economists. So I'd say, you know, the current FED chairman who served in the Treasury, he served in business. He's he likes that about him. That's what I would say. More than anything, he thinks you should have people who really understand the markets in the real world. Christine, on a lighter note, I learned some new words in this book, and there was one in particular on page one oh nine called disappeal. I guess it's a French word and it means the state of being dressed only partially or nightclothes. And it doesn't that make the book sound sexy? Don't you want to run into that? Central Banking is sexy, but full of words like that that doesn't really use it in a in a sexy ways us to refer to some people protesting the FEDS monetary policy. But I understand that he did have a very fascinating vocabulary. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean that. One thing that was interesting to me as sort of the professional writer who came into that exercise and him being a you know, central banker and government official, was how often I would come across these words that he would use that I'd say, Wow, that's an interesting, unusual word, and I'd look it up and and he'd nailed it. He'd find that he'd find these uses of words that I wouldn't. And I did look in this book because I wanted to talk about it. I couldn't find any quick examples. But that's a good one that dil. We had a whole debate about whether that was really the right word. We looked it up in various dictionaries. But he cared immensely about word choice, and he would go back and forth and come up with exactly. You know, we we discuss what is the best word to describe this person? You know? And and when you read Minutes, you see how much of the discussion often comes down to how do we communicate this particular idea and what what wording should we use in the statement, because so much about how central bankers communicate and and do their job is through word choice and writing and communications and and so so he does have this gift for language, which I hadn't really anticipated when I went into it. I've written thousands of words about one or two words in the FED statement. I can exactly agree with that. On the subject of the minutes. Back to the transparency issue, it is also true we've become accustomed two minutes of each Federal Open Market Committee meeting coming out three weeks after that meeting. That didn't used to be the case, and certainly was not the case in the Volka era. Right. No, and actually in his early years, I mean or actually through his career, they never they never stated what the FED funds rate was going to be. They would state what they were doing in the money supply, and people in the market were paid a lot of money to try to figure out what the FED funds rate was going to going to do. And it's only more recently and he and he's not completely convinced that that's better, you know. So, there's some ways in which this transparency has gone maybe beyond what he thinks is right, and he and he admits maybe he's wrong. Maybe it's just he's used to the way it was, but he thought there was a certain flexibility they had and not having to come right out and say here's what the Fed funds rate is going to be. Now he reserves some special scrutiny for a very small country on the far side of the world. And I'm not talking about Australia. I am talking about the place right next door. What is his bugaboo with New Zealand. Well, his bugaboo is not so much with New Zealand, which he commends for its excellent fishing. But he talks in the end of the book about this idea of targeting two percent inflation, which, as somebody who fought inflation, he doesn't like the idea of trying to create inflation of any number. And so it puzzles him and frustrates him that everybody is obsessed with trying to get inflation up to two percent. Getting inflation up is anathemat Now he's for down, He's for down, easy, for lower inflation, no inflation. But he so he has this whole section which we ran on Bloomberg opinion as well about how that number came to be. How the where the two percent come from? And he said, he thinks it's from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, which decided they needed to take drastic action on inflation back in the early nineties, late eighties, and they set a two percent target and got there and found it was a very effective means of fighting inflation. And so it's been adopted by other countries. Not least target have proliferated. I mean, the US has a version of two, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Sweden, you name it, far and wide. How much do these numerical targets and the almost sacramental quality that they've taken on hinder good policy in his view greatly the policy should be. You know, it's kind of the difference between principles based regulation and rules based regulation, which is another bugaboo of his. He likes things to be based on principles. You know, let's let's have inflation that doesn't you know, price stability, you know, you know, when prices are reasonably stable because they don't effect of business or consumer decisions. That's what he wants. He doesn't like this idea of being so precise on the numbers, because he thinks it's ridiculous. The data is not that precise, and there's this kind of false belief in precision that troubles him. Christine just wants to wrap up with a couple of final questions here. You know, there's this sense of public service under current of his commitment to good government, like like you were talking about that that really runs throughout the book. And yet you know, someone might think, is this a screed against Donald Trump? And it's it's really not. The words Donald Trump only appear once in the book, that the Trump administration has mentioned only a handful of times. He even even positively once or twice. And Folker says several times he's often labeled as a Democrat, but he actually gave up his political affiliation many decades ago, and he really tries to be a political And yet and yet we can sense that he's really no big fan of President Trump. Why did he not go any further in this book. Well, he at his root does not believe in being political. His father wasn't a political city manager who executed excellent management of the city of t Neck, New Jersey and helped turn it around and it as FED chairman, he didn't think you should be political. He's been so much of his career in the in the FED, he served under Democrats and Republicans. He doesn't think that the issues for him are about which party is in office. It's really about are they running things well? How can it be better effective government? And so to the degree that the Trump administration is not effective and is not running things well, he's obviously unhappy, but he also sees that there have been other administrations, both Democratic and Republican, who have done the same, and he he specifically calls out Ronald Reagan for having started this kind of language about government being the problem that has infiltrated are our discourse in this country and reduced the trust in government. You know, looking back over old magazine covers, Vulker is often pictured surrounded by these clouds of smoke. Now were they from cigars? Were they from pipes? What did he like to smoke? And it's inconceivable we would see that today. Does he think society has become too sanitized? No? Actually, I mean most of the photos you'll see in stock photography of him or him with this big cigar. He was famous for his cheap cigars. He'd never liked to smoke expensive cigars because he, you know, was very frugal at heart, And so I actually persuaded him to include a few a short little section on his cigars, because he has an interesting story about how he decided to quit right around the time he left the FED, and he really is so glad he quit and feels so guilty actually for subjecting so many people to the cigar smoke for so long. It was I think in part of prop you know, it helped calm him down. He um recognizes that society changed. He's in no way trying to persuade anybody to smoke ours. Christine. Finally, this book was actually not supposed to come out for a few more weeks. The publisher moved it up to, uh, the end of October. Can you tell us a little bit about that decision. Yes, that was pretty unusual for the publisher, and we're grateful they were able to do that. Paul's pretty sick. He was in great shape and still going to the office until mid August, and you know, really worked hard, hard, hard, often staying later in the office and his assistant or I would working away on his draft and taking the bus and going to uh fishing trips and things like that. And then in August he was diagnosed with pretty serious illness. So he's been he's been home and he's you know, fighting this and you know, he's ninety one, so he's doing his best to keep going, keeping at it, so to speak, exactly all right. Christine Harper, editor of Bloomberg Markets magazine and collaborator with Paul Vulker on the new book Keeping at It. We're very grateful that you were able to join us on Benchmark. Thank you so much, Christine, Thank you so much for having me. Benchmark will be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, our Bloomberg app, as well as podcast destinations like Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen. We'd love it if you talk the time to rate and review the show so more people can find us. You can follow me on Twitter at moss Underscore Echo, I'm at start Lammin and Christine, you are d r under Poor Harper. Benchmark is produced by Topah Foreheads, the head of Bloomberg podcasts is Francesca lev thanks for listening, See you next time. Four

Paul Vulker is a giant of global finance, literally and figuratively. At six ft seven inches or about two meters tall, he towered over most everyone around him, and as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the nineteen eighties and in countless other roles in public service, he made his mark on the world. Now, at age ninety one, he's published a new memoir called Keeping at It, and his collaborator happens to be one of our Bloomberg colleagues, Christine Harper. This week on Benchmark, we'll talk with Christine about why he wrote the book and what it was like to work with him. Welcome to Benchmark. I'm Scott Landman, economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington, and now I'm Daniel Moss, columnist at Bloomberg Opinion in New York. Were joined by Christine Kappa, editor of Bloomberg Markets the same She's been a reporter and editor with Bloomberg for twenty years. I first met Christine in the early aughts in the London office, when she was wrestling with stories about Merrill Lynch's bond desk. We're recording this on Tuesday. The book Keeping at It should be available wherever you buy good books. Christine, welcome to Benchmark. Thanks for having me. It's a it's a pleasure, Christine. Congratulations on the book. How did you come to work with Paul Wolker on it? Well, it really does a hugely lucky break. Unlike the two of you, I'm not an economics expert, as you know, I have been covering the financial industry here for a long time at Bloomberg, and I happen to know a man named Peter Osenos who runs a publishing firm called Public Affairs. He's quite close to Paul Volker, having having published Mr Walker's book in h called Changing Fortunes. So Peter called me up one day and said that Paul Wolker was interested in writing a memoir. But at that point he was a vettor ninety and Peter, who's been in publishing for a long time, thought it might make sense to have somebody work with him, And it might make most sense if it was somebody in New York City who could easily get back and forth to Paul's office and um to his home to work with him. So was I interested, and I said, let me think about it for one day and pretty quickly realized this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Even though I had never written a book and I was an expert economics, I couldn't imagine there was any downside and getting to spend time with Paul Walker and learned all his stories and just see what that was like. So, um, that's what I did. And uh, and I think Peter's view was that there'd be some kind of chemistry that we would work well together. I'm not really sure why he had that insight, but it proved to be correct. Paul didn't know me from Adam. When he was introduced to me, he immediately was very friendly and very willing to work with me, and we started having regular meetings where I would record these interviews with him, with the thought being that I would eventually take the transcripts and blend them all into a book. But of course, you know, even though he was kind of in and out of the hospital with various health issues, he ended up started churning out pages and pages on a yellow pad of basically the manuscript and having his assistant typed them up. And I looked at them and said, well, these are really good. Keep going. So I would get these emailed files his assistant would you know, send them along to me, and I would work with Paul and them and he was just great. And I kept waiting for him to become in some way, you know, difficult to our dolimineering or stubborn or something, and he was. He never was. We just had a great time. I never went to a meeting with him, and we we we've been meeting now for more than a year, several times a week. I never left a meeting with him not feeling happier than when I went into it. He's just a wonderful guy. And I learned so much every every meeting. Okay, now, twice in that answer, you've mentioned that you're not an economics expert. You don't have a background in economics. I think you're selling yourself a little short here. You have run finance reporting at Bloomberg News. But to the core of that question, did that make your role easier or harder not having formal qualifications in economics. I think it was probably a little bit of both. So I I didn't have the familiarity with some of the um stories that both of you I'm sure would have had, so I had to do more research to understand them. But I also sort of forced him to explain things that maybe somebody who was very comfortable with economics wouldn't have needed explained and might have been just more willing to fall into sort of a jargony insider voice. Um. That said, he his natural inclination is to be pretty plain spoken. So a lot of the out of the book is very readable just because he writes in a very readable way. He doesn't like to um to use jargon. He really doesn't. I mean, I don't. I don't know if can I tell the story about how we came up with the title. Okay, So we really struggled with the title, and it was very telling about him because but we were coming up with all these titles that sounded like, you know, the titles of a great man's book, you know, um, Mr Chairman, and you know, things with great sort of august themes, and he couldn't stand that. He really was opposed to anything that sounded pompous. He didn't want anything like, for instance, Ben Bernanke's book The Courage to Act. He was allergic to that type of tone in his in in a book title. So we kept going back and forth, and there's a story if you read the book that he starts out with a joke, and the joke is about a parent. And so he wanted the title to be, and he was quite serious with this. He wanted the title to be The Wise Parrot Speaks, and the publisher and I and everybody around him sort of said, well, that's very funny, but I don't think anybody will understand it. They don't really necessarily recognize what that's about. And he said, yeah, but that'll that'll intrigue people. People buy it anyway. So we had a lot of we had a lot of discussion that this was probably the most difficult thing. And then finally one day I said, well, there's this phrase in some of the minutes sustained commitment, which I think sort of sums up your description of your life and you're fighting against inflation. And he looked at me and said, keeping at it, and I realized, like, that's the simplest way to say sustained commitment. So that's that became the title. So he gave up on The Wise Parrot Speaks, and UH gracefully suggested the title that we have now. Um, I'm glad to hear that. I'm curious also, Christine, you know some more about the collaboration process that you were starting to go into. Yeah. I think he refers to in his book that that that you were checking and rechecking some of his anecdotes. I mean, as someone in his forties now, I think it would be difficult for me to write my own memoir. And yet at age he was recalling things from his childhood, you know, all sorts of events early in his life, a lot of his work life in the fifties, in sixties at the Treasury and and the Fed. How were you able to, you know, to flesh out some of these stories that he told. Well, one thing that's so remarkable about his life is almost every chapter there are stories that have entire books written about them. So my my home office right now is stacked from from Florida ceiling with various books, which in many cases are just to sort of do more research on a few paragraphs in one chapter of his book. So you know, I just wentn't to find any kind of source material, I shood there are a lot of it was and you if you look at the notes, a lot of it is looking back at news articles from the time. You know, there are great archives on the New York Times website, for instance, which really help, and then newspapers dot com things like that where you can find news articles about events as they were happening, and that's that was a pretty helpful way to check things. Many people would recognize Vulcar as the central banker that broke the back of inflation, of course in the United States. How comfortable is he with this kind of canonization, Well, I he appreciates that, with the fact that people um sometimes still come up to him on the street and thank him for what he did, He's humbled by it, but he's grateful, and he feels so strongly about serving the country that to know that he's done something that people feel made a difference, I think matters a lot to him. I think he's constantly coming up with new things he wants to fix in the country, and he's also quite humble about ways in which he failed to do things. I mean, there's a lot of the beginning of the book is about his failure to basically create an international monetary system, and once Breton Woods broke down and he was really he was really upset about that. So um, there's a combination in the book of I think him telling the sort of heroic story of Paul Wolker, which you can't avoid but admit is heroic in many respects, but also being quite self critical at points. He doesn't always come off as an amazing superhero. Do circumstances create the man or does the man shape the circumstances. Would anyone serving as chair of the FADE, given the inflation landscape at the time, have taken the steps he took. Well, that's interesting thing that he likes to talk about. So obviously he followed two FED chairman who didn't take the action that was required. When he was brought in, the problem was so acute that he felt that he had great support in doing things that were very difficult. So he he does sort of admit that as much as he gets credit for being strong and fighting back against politicians who wanted to impeach him, he always felt there was this reserve of public support from him because things had gotten so bad and they were at such a point of crisis. So Um, however, I mean, he did have to be very clever and how he did that, and there's a section and how he where he describes the decision to target the money supply as effectively sort of lashing the FED to the mast. They had no choice but to follow through, and that inoculated him against some criticisms because he could say, we're just looking at the money supply. We're sorry, he and he admits if if he had ever been told interest rates were going to go up, he might have just run away immediately, but he sort of he sort of created a system where he almost had had an ability and the Fed had ability to say, it's out of our hands. We're just we're just looking at something else. Interest rates are not under our control anymore. We'll get back to the issue of targets in a minute. It seems like Christine that you know, there are so many interesting stories about his early life and his childhood, and one of them in there may even have informed his thinking when he was at the FED in the late seventies without him even knowing it. And it seems like it that that comes from his mother's economics textbook that he found from all the way back in nineteen eleven and the notes she wrote in the margins. Can you tell us a little bit about that part of the story. Yeah, this is this is this was an amazing discovery. I mean, we talked a lot in the book about his father and they influence his father and his father's career in public service had on Paul. But what was really interesting was right towards the end when that we already actually put out the Galley version of the book and we're making final corrections to it. I was at his home and I was looking through He has this room with the you know, bookcases all around the room, and I was looking for a book that he said I could find somewhere, and I found another book and it was a tiny, little hard wound volume which was printed in in the early nineteen hundreds. It was it was his his mother's Vasser economics text book from nineteen eleven. It had a lot of her handwriting in it. All all the margins were covered with her handwriting, and including on page eight, I think there was a sentence where she had scrawled economic laws cannot be dependent upon if we disregard psychology, et cetera. And I showed this to him and he was, first of all, he'd just dunfounded, he'd forgotten he had it. It reminded him that his mother had been I guess, really passionate about economics, studying it before the FED was created in nineteen eleven. Anyway, he he had completely forgotten how much his mother cared about economics, and also that people were having this in site about the importance of psychology even before. He sort of feels that he had that insight during his career at the fact, in the understanding that you had to find a simple way to communicate with the public about what you were doing and the money supply with the way to do it. He appointment in nineteen sev nine by Jimmy Carter can also be seen as the start of the quote unquote model an era in central banking. Uh thereafter inflation not so much of a problem, but also the idea of policy and the controversy that it's sometimes courted being associated with a single figure, and it sort of helps that he's this towering guy. Do you think Carter knew what he was getting into when Volka was appointed? How big a job was the Federal Reserve chairman back in the day. Well, he describes how there was a lot of controversy he knows about appointing him, and there was a camp in the Carter White House that was very opposed to appointing him because they recognized he would be independent, they wouldn't be able to control him. He was likely to raise interest rates a lot. That was not going to be good for Carter and his reelection chances. And they were right, But there were obviously other voices that persuaded him. It was important he was going to be popular and Wills read for instance, and and Carter realized the problems were so bad he couldn't get anything done that he had to deal with this inflation problem and basically took a bullet, basically agreed to do this. And it was one of the things that perhaps cost some re election. But yes, so you have this FED chairman who's got the willingness of the President and also his successor, Ronald Reagan, who supported him publicly all the time to do what what needed to be done. And uh, and he did it. And that was a big difference because a lot of other FED chairman had had I mean, Arthur Burns had a great you know, he was very well respected figure, he was very well known, but he just didn't do what was required. Through the eighties when you and I were growing up, there was a narrative that the Carti years were sort of a shorthand for American weakness and American failure. That view, you know, has come into some scrutiny lately, and President Carter looks better with a couple of decades hindsight. How does folk feel about President card Well, so early in our discussions, early in our meetings, he was reading the early version of Stuart Eisenstadt's book about Carter, and there's a big chapter in there about Vulcar and uh, and he was very pleased by that, you know, because Stewart Eisenstadt was one of those people who opposed Vulcar back in the day. He was, you know, more on the liberal wing. He was afraid about high interest rates. But now in hindsight recognized and recognizes that one of the great things that President Carter did was named Paul Wolker. And President Carter has always said that as well. So I think, you know, obviously Paul Wolker loves that, and uh, and I think he really respects Carter and and his willingness to do the difficult things. Um and and sort of the way he also has behaved in his post presidency He sees him as a really great public servant who hasn't quite gotten his due. He recognized this, that he made mistakes, and there are reasons that, you know, Reagan was able to achieve things that Carter wasn't. But you know, I think he considers Carter one of the presidents he admires. For sure. It sounds like he thinks or is still underwrited. Yes, I would say that's true, Christine. In the thirty years since Vulcar left the chairmanship of the FED, he's rarely set still. He served on many public commissions, reparations for Nazi victims, the the Obama uh financial regulation initiative that eventually became the Vulcar Rule. He even expresses some amusement that his name always became attached to these commissions, like the Vulgar Commission, the Vulcar this the Vulgar that does any of these? Do any of these particular roles stand out for him as the most memorable or the most important in his post FED career. Uh? Well, I mean he talks about how pretty much the first thing he left he left to do after leaving the FED was to serve on a national commission for public service, and then he immediately served on another one, and he has devoted his career in the last few years to an organization called the Vulkan Alliance, which is trying to improve public service. So I think that, above all is the thing that he cares about the most. Obviously these other things. Trying to end corruption is incredibly important to him, and he feels very proud of what they did, um with getting some money back for the families of Holocaust victims, um. But you know the thing, that thing that really strikes me about all of that is that he he did a lot of these very difficult, very controversial jobs that required somebody of great integrity, and he wouldn't take money for that. And I sort of mentioned this to him while we were working on the book, that should we mention you didn't take money. He said, now, so we don't even have that in the book. But he he really felt that it was important to do and he didn't want to get renumerated for it. I want to get back to this issue of his chairmanship and the dawn of the modern central bank. I mean, again partly helped by the break of inflation and the fact that Vulcar is physically a very big guy. Do you think that the cult of personality surrounding many central bankers in the world today is a good thing, and more importantly, does Vulca think it's a good thing. Well, I I don't think we ever talked about the cult of personality, but I'll tell you a few things that he said that sort of connected to that. One is that it bothers him that he's sometimes criticized for being having been secretive at the FED. And he will point out that there was one year he testified in front of Congress something like thirty four times. He felt he was on things like the Sunday Morning Meet the Press shows, which you don't see the FED chairman do anymore. He was very out there, So it bothers him that he's sort of sometimes tagged with the secrecy thing. He also feels very strongly that it's helpful to have central bankers who aren't just academic economists. He reserves a little bit of scorn for the academic economists in the book, and things like econometrics he's not a fan of. Well. He talks about how how he was going to get his PhD but kept putting it off and putting it off. Yeah, yeah, he never He never did his dissertation, and he really feels what he what he learned about economics that served him well was understanding the psychology of the market from sitting on the trading desk at the New York FED and from being a chase for two stints in his early career and working in the Treasury department. So he is very supportive of having people at the FED who aren't just academic economists. So I'd say, you know, the current FED chairman who served in the Treasury, he served in business. He's he likes that about him. That's what I would say. More than anything, he thinks you should have people who really understand the markets in the real world. Christine, on a lighter note, I learned some new words in this book, and there was one in particular on page one oh nine called disappeal. I guess it's a French word and it means the state of being dressed only partially or nightclothes. And it doesn't that make the book sound sexy? Don't you want to run into that? Central Banking is sexy, but full of words like that that doesn't really use it in a in a sexy ways us to refer to some people protesting the FEDS monetary policy. But I understand that he did have a very fascinating vocabulary. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean that. One thing that was interesting to me as sort of the professional writer who came into that exercise and him being a you know, central banker and government official, was how often I would come across these words that he would use that I'd say, Wow, that's an interesting, unusual word, and I'd look it up and and he'd nailed it. He'd find that he'd find these uses of words that I wouldn't. And I did look in this book because I wanted to talk about it. I couldn't find any quick examples. But that's a good one that dil. We had a whole debate about whether that was really the right word. We looked it up in various dictionaries. But he cared immensely about word choice, and he would go back and forth and come up with exactly. You know, we we discuss what is the best word to describe this person? You know? And and when you read Minutes, you see how much of the discussion often comes down to how do we communicate this particular idea and what what wording should we use in the statement, because so much about how central bankers communicate and and do their job is through word choice and writing and communications and and so so he does have this gift for language, which I hadn't really anticipated when I went into it. I've written thousands of words about one or two words in the FED statement. I can exactly agree with that. On the subject of the minutes. Back to the transparency issue, it is also true we've become accustomed two minutes of each Federal Open Market Committee meeting coming out three weeks after that meeting. That didn't used to be the case, and certainly was not the case in the Volka era. Right. No, and actually in his early years, I mean or actually through his career, they never they never stated what the FED funds rate was going to be. They would state what they were doing in the money supply, and people in the market were paid a lot of money to try to figure out what the FED funds rate was going to going to do. And it's only more recently and he and he's not completely convinced that that's better, you know. So, there's some ways in which this transparency has gone maybe beyond what he thinks is right, and he and he admits maybe he's wrong. Maybe it's just he's used to the way it was, but he thought there was a certain flexibility they had and not having to come right out and say here's what the Fed funds rate is going to be. Now he reserves some special scrutiny for a very small country on the far side of the world. And I'm not talking about Australia. I am talking about the place right next door. What is his bugaboo with New Zealand. Well, his bugaboo is not so much with New Zealand, which he commends for its excellent fishing. But he talks in the end of the book about this idea of targeting two percent inflation, which, as somebody who fought inflation, he doesn't like the idea of trying to create inflation of any number. And so it puzzles him and frustrates him that everybody is obsessed with trying to get inflation up to two percent. Getting inflation up is anathemat Now he's for down, He's for down, easy, for lower inflation, no inflation. But he so he has this whole section which we ran on Bloomberg opinion as well about how that number came to be. How the where the two percent come from? And he said, he thinks it's from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, which decided they needed to take drastic action on inflation back in the early nineties, late eighties, and they set a two percent target and got there and found it was a very effective means of fighting inflation. And so it's been adopted by other countries. Not least target have proliferated. I mean, the US has a version of two, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Sweden, you name it, far and wide. How much do these numerical targets and the almost sacramental quality that they've taken on hinder good policy in his view greatly the policy should be. You know, it's kind of the difference between principles based regulation and rules based regulation, which is another bugaboo of his. He likes things to be based on principles. You know, let's let's have inflation that doesn't you know, price stability, you know, you know, when prices are reasonably stable because they don't effect of business or consumer decisions. That's what he wants. He doesn't like this idea of being so precise on the numbers, because he thinks it's ridiculous. The data is not that precise, and there's this kind of false belief in precision that troubles him. Christine just wants to wrap up with a couple of final questions here. You know, there's this sense of public service under current of his commitment to good government, like like you were talking about that that really runs throughout the book. And yet you know, someone might think, is this a screed against Donald Trump? And it's it's really not. The words Donald Trump only appear once in the book, that the Trump administration has mentioned only a handful of times. He even even positively once or twice. And Folker says several times he's often labeled as a Democrat, but he actually gave up his political affiliation many decades ago, and he really tries to be a political And yet and yet we can sense that he's really no big fan of President Trump. Why did he not go any further in this book. Well, he at his root does not believe in being political. His father wasn't a political city manager who executed excellent management of the city of t Neck, New Jersey and helped turn it around and it as FED chairman, he didn't think you should be political. He's been so much of his career in the in the FED, he served under Democrats and Republicans. He doesn't think that the issues for him are about which party is in office. It's really about are they running things well? How can it be better effective government? And so to the degree that the Trump administration is not effective and is not running things well, he's obviously unhappy, but he also sees that there have been other administrations, both Democratic and Republican, who have done the same, and he he specifically calls out Ronald Reagan for having started this kind of language about government being the problem that has infiltrated are our discourse in this country and reduced the trust in government. You know, looking back over old magazine covers, Vulker is often pictured surrounded by these clouds of smoke. Now were they from cigars? Were they from pipes? What did he like to smoke? And it's inconceivable we would see that today. Does he think society has become too sanitized? No? Actually, I mean most of the photos you'll see in stock photography of him or him with this big cigar. He was famous for his cheap cigars. He'd never liked to smoke expensive cigars because he, you know, was very frugal at heart, And so I actually persuaded him to include a few a short little section on his cigars, because he has an interesting story about how he decided to quit right around the time he left the FED, and he really is so glad he quit and feels so guilty actually for subjecting so many people to the cigar smoke for so long. It was I think in part of prop you know, it helped calm him down. He um recognizes that society changed. He's in no way trying to persuade anybody to smoke ours. Christine. Finally, this book was actually not supposed to come out for a few more weeks. The publisher moved it up to, uh, the end of October. Can you tell us a little bit about that decision. Yes, that was pretty unusual for the publisher, and we're grateful they were able to do that. Paul's pretty sick. He was in great shape and still going to the office until mid August, and you know, really worked hard, hard, hard, often staying later in the office and his assistant or I would working away on his draft and taking the bus and going to uh fishing trips and things like that. And then in August he was diagnosed with pretty serious illness. So he's been he's been home and he's you know, fighting this and you know, he's ninety one, so he's doing his best to keep going, keeping at it, so to speak, exactly all right. Christine Harper, editor of Bloomberg Markets magazine and collaborator with Paul Vulker on the new book Keeping at It. We're very grateful that you were able to join us on Benchmark. Thank you so much, Christine, Thank you so much for having me. Benchmark will be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, our Bloomberg app, as well as podcast destinations like Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen. We'd love it if you talk the time to rate and review the show so more people can find us. You can follow me on Twitter at moss Underscore Echo, I'm at start Lammin and Christine, you are d r under Poor Harper. Benchmark is produced by Topah Foreheads, the head of Bloomberg podcasts is Francesca lev thanks for listening, See you next time. Four