RIP Paul Volcker

We live in a world in which individuals and businessmen, as never before, have the capacity and the incentives to buy and sell, invest and travel, where they want and when they want -- and they want to do so unencumbered by national boundaries.  At the same time, modern democracies, at least as much as other forms of government, long for autonomy; they want to control their own destinies in ways responsive to the needs of an electorate often concerned less with national than with local or sectorial interests.  Yet, theory and experience indicate we can't have it both ways, full integration and full autonomy.

-- Paul Adolph Volcker, Jr. (5 September 1927 - 8 December 2019), American economist, Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987, "The Political Economy of the Dollar", the Fred Hirsch lecture at Warwick University, Coventry, England, 9 November 1978