Paul Volcker
Financial reform and banks
Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and former chair of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, was on campus in early April to discuss financial reform legislation and the banking system crash. Banks, Volcker said, play a crucial role in society, and because we rely on them, we give them special protection and special borrowing status. “If that’s all true,” Volcker said, “they ought to pay attention to their fundamental business and not get involved in all the activities that drove us over the cliff in the first decade of the century.” He discussed the “Volcker rule,” a provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), which prohibits banks from trading for their own account.