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UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites)'s new chief of staff heads to Washington on Wednesday to meet with critics and supporters of the United Nations (news - web sites) following a critical report of U.N. actions in the oil-for-food program in Iraq (news - web sites). Mark Malloch Brown's high-profile trip is aimed at informing U.S. lawmakers about ongoing U.N. management and administrative reforms and appears to be the opening salvo in a new offensive by Annan to present the world body in a more positive light. One of the U.S. lawmakers Malloch Brown is scheduled...

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will speak Thursday during a virtual version of the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming, conference. He is expected to outline what could be the central bank’s most active efforts ever to spur inflation back to a healthy level. “Average inflation” targeting means the Fed will allow inflation to run higher than normal for a period of time. The effort will be the reverse of former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s rate hikes instituted to quash inflation in the 1980s. History will remember Paul Volcker and Jerome Powell as standing on the opposite ends of the inflation canyon,...

[Volcker's] obituaries were disappointing for them almost uniformly promoting the fiction of Volcker as inflation slayer. Such a view doesn’t square with simple economic history. Indeed, explicit in the accepted wisdom that Volcker was “inflation’s worst enemy” (Hoover Institution’s John Taylor) is that economic growth causes inflation. As Phillips Curve devotee Neil Irwin put it in the New York Times, Volcker allegedly beat inflation “at the cost of what would become the worst recession in the seven decades between the Great Depression and the global financial crisis.” In the analysis of seemingly everyone, job loss and greatly reduced prosperity were...

Paul A. Volcker, who helped shape American economic policy for more than six decades, most notably by leading the Federal Reserve’s brute-force campaign to subdue inflation in the late 1970s and early ’80s, died on Sunday in New York. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Janice Zima, who did not specify the cause. Mr. Volcker had been treated for prostate cancer, which was diagnosed in 2018. Mr. Volcker, a towering, taciturn and somewhat rumpled figure, arrived in Washington as America’s postwar economic hegemony was beginning to crumble. He would devote his professional life to wrestling with...

ThereÂ’s a sense that the bureaucrats who command the federal leviathan work for themselves, not for the country at large. That wasnÂ’t true of Paul Volcker. Since his death last week, Paul Volcker has been heavily eulogized. ThatÂ’s not the purpose here. In these trying times, AmericansÂ’ faith in our nationÂ’s institutions is at historic lows. Once-vaunted organizations like the FBI now struggle to command a majority of AmericansÂ’ support.The causes for this are legion. But there is a general sense that the vast federal appendages created in the last 100 years have little connection to the interests of...

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein manipulated the United Nations oil-for-food program so that his regime received $1.8 billion in illicit payments, a U.N.-backed independent report said Thursday. The investigation, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said kickbacks came from some 66 member states and illicit surcharges came from 40 member states. The report also said Marc Rich & Co. financed 4 million barrels of oil under a 9.5-million-barrel contract awarded to the European Oil and Trading Co. (EOTC), a French-based shell company. "Surcharges were imposed on the oil," the report said, and "Marc Rich & Co. directed BNP...

The publication yesterday of Paul Volcker's fifth and final report on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program tells us little we didn't know about the broad outlines of the $100 billion scandal. But, oh, are the details ever instructive. The Volcker report confirms that Saddam Hussein demanded, and got, some $1.8 billion in illegal surcharges, kickbacks and bribes from companies doing business in Iraq. It confirms that he steered billions in oil and humanitarian contracts to his politically preferred clients, particularly Russia and France, and smaller sums to agents of influence (or their associates) such as British MP George Galloway,...

Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan who later played a role in the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis of 2009, has died at the age of 92. Multiple media outlets reported that Volcker, who raised interest rates as the Fed's chief to combat inflation, had died. In the Obama years, Volcker reemerged to tout a rule, eventually called the Volcker rule, that put tougher constraints on big banks.

UNITED NATIONS - A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, says he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allow Russia to skim profits. Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia's U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names, but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies...

President Trump has made a lot of ill-advised nominations. But perhaps no single choice could inflict more long-term damage than the one he announced Friday: Stephen Moore, Trump’s pick to join the Federal Reserve Board. Moore’s many economic claims over the years have revealed him to be, shall we say, easily confused. A decade ago, as the Fed was battling deflation (that is, price declines ) during the financial crisis, Moore preposterously fearmongered that hyperinflation (that is, out-of-control price increases ) was nigh: Americans could soon be carting “wheelbarrows full” of cash a la Weimar Germany. Moore has also repeatedly...

Jerry Powell apparently doesn’t get it. The new head of the Federal Reserve isn’t supposed to imply that he doesn’t work for Wall Street. And he’s not supposed to say, as he did the other day in front of Congress, that “we don’t manage the stock market — we manage stable prices and maximum employment.” That’s not what Wall Street and the stock market want to hear. And that was proven by the fact that the stock market dropped sharply on Tuesday when Powell was speaking. And Powell’s comments were one of the reasons Wall Street’s pros couldn’t get a...

Will somebody please explain to me how rising inflation is somehow going to extricate us from the tepid economic recovery? I don't get it. It used to be hypothesized that low inflation was the key to high economic growth. For everybody in the economy, low inflation was a tax cut. Conversely, rapidly rising prices were thought to penalize the economy by placing a tax-hike effect on investors, businesses, and families. It was this logic that spurred Paul Volcker (especially) and then Alan Greenspan to labor mightily in the 1980s and 1990s to bring inflation down. The Fed's favorite inflation...

the bogey man known as “systemic risk” to gain advantage over the other creditors . ... In order for the OTC casino to work, the derivatives contracts had to be given special priority in bankruptcy. Speculative derivative instruments such as credit default swaps (CDS), which caused the failure and government bailout of American International Group, could never exist in significant size were in not for the safe harbor from bankruptcy for derivatives created by Congress in the 1980s and 1990s. Members of Congress from both parties were paid very well for their treachery. ... The intellectual author of the “systemic...

Out on the campaign trail, Fed head Ben Bernanke is an unpopular guy. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have both said they would replace Bernanke, not reappoint him. Rep. Ron Paul would swap the whole Federal Reserve monetary system for a gold-linked dollar, making the yellow metal legal tender. And it was Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, before he dropped out of the race, who said more quantitative easing by the Fed would be "almost treasonous." Republicans in Washington are equally unimpressed by Bernanke. Rep. Paul Ryan recently criticized the Fed for bankrolling our huge budget deficits and thereby accommodating...

It should be clear that among the causes of the recent financial crisis was an unjustified faith in rational expectations, market efficiencies, and the techniques of modern finance. That faith was stoked in part by the huge financial rewards that enabled the extremes of borrowing, the economic imbalances, and the pretenses and assurances of the credit-rating agencies to persist so long. A relaxed approach by regulators and legislators reflected the new financial zeitgeist. All the seeming mathematical precision that was brought to investment, all the complicated new products, including the explosion of derivatives, that were intended to diffuse and minimize...

Aired February 14, 2010...FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria. On the show today, a rare interview with the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker. He's, of course, currently a key adviser to President Obama. But he earned his place in history for something he did almost three decades ago. Paul Volcker killed inflation. You will remember that in the 1970s, the United States was experiencing uncontrolled inflation, higher than at any time in its modern history. Savings were being...

That’s why a recent speech by Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a voice of reason on matters financial, is so timely and important. Presented last month to the Group of 30, an organization devoted to international economic issues, the speech outlined crucial work that still must be done to safeguard our financial future. “Three Years Later: Unfinished Business in Financial Reform” was the title. “By now it is pretty clear that it was faith in the techniques of modern finance, stoked in part by the apparent huge financial rewards, that enabled the extremes of...

[...] Regardless of when he officially announces his candidacy – the “libertarian in disguise” was thrown a curve ball last week when Republican congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul announced he was considering a 2012 bid. Johnson, who would be a natural to tap into Paul’s base, shrugged off any concerns over sharing the limelight with Paul, saying the congressman “still has his heyday today.” “First of all, having a couple people talk about the same thing, I think, is really powerful. I mean, that’s a good thing!” he told TheDC. When asked if he is in regular communication...

The United States does not face a problem of rising inflation for several years and also does not risk a damaging spell of falling prices, Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Monday. "Inflation is not a problem right now. It won't be a problem next year, it won't be a problem for several years," said Volcker, who is now chairman of the Obama administration's Economic Recovery Board. "I see no possibility, frankly, that a deflation will take place," Volcker said during a panel discussion on financial reform at Boston College. "Over a period of time, price stability...

The Congressional Budget Office, in last week's update of President Obama's budget forecasts, estimated that budget deficits will average nearly $1 trillion per year for the next decade. There is no school of economics (classical, Austrian, Keynesian, etc.) that says deficits of this magnitude for a decade or longer will not result in great economic hardship or worse. Greece, here we come. The operative question is, why would the president sign off on such a budget without presenting some plan to get the United States out of the mess - and where are his economists? Mr. Obama assembled a team...