By Jackie Calmes, WSJ
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is one of the big-name endorsement for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, lending his gravitas in the financial world to a presidential candidate whose biggest hurdle is to convince voters he is experienced enough to be president.
“After 30 years in government, serving under five Presidents of both parties and chairing two non-partisan commissions on the Public Service, I have been reluctant to engage in political campaigns. The time has come to overcome that reluctance,” Mr. Volcker said in a statement today. “However, it is not the current turmoil in markets or the economic uncertainties that have impelled my decision. Rather, it is the breadth and depth of challenges that face our nation at home and abroad. Those challenges demand a new leadership and a fresh approach.”
He concluded: “It is only Barack Obama, in his person, in his ideas, in his ability to understand and to articulate both our needs and our hopes that provide the potential for strong and fresh leadership. That leadership must begin here in America but it can also restore needed confidence in our vision, our strength, and our purposes right around the world.”
Mr. Volcker, a Democrat, was appointed to the Fed chairmanship by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and replaced – with Alan Greenspan – by Ronald Reagan just a couple of months before the 1987 stock market crash. He is widely respected among central bankers, Wall Street and economists for breaking the back of inflation in the 1980s – at the cost of the deepest recession the country has seen since the Great Depression. An economist, he was earlier president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979 and an under secretary of the Treasury from 1969 to 1974.
Since retiring from the Fed, he did a stint as chairman of of Wolfensohn & Co., an investment banking firm founded by the former president of the World Bank, and led investigations of corruption controls at the World Bank and the controversial United Nations’ oil-for-food deal with Saddam Hussein.