经济学人下载:前美联储主席保罗·沃尔克(3)

He was happy, even at the Fed, to wear crumpled suits, live in a students' apartment block and fly coach back to New York and the family at weekends. (His salary had fallen by half when he went from the New York Fed to Washington, and even when he returned to Wall Street in 1987, making $1m a year, he kept his old pinchpenny ways.) As for discipline, he smoked AC Grenadier cigars not only because they were cheap, at a quarter each, but also because he had trained himself to like only what he could afford.
保罗·沃尔克很开心，即使在美联储，他都穿着发皱的西装，生活在学生公寓，周末乘长途飞机回纽约和家人团聚。当他从纽约的美联储去到华盛顿时，他的工资已经降了一半。甚至在19887年回到华尔街时，年薪100万的他依然维持着自己吝啬的生活方式。至于纪律性，保罗·沃尔克抽AC掷弹兵雪茄，不仅因为它们便宜，25美分一支，也是因为他训练自己只喜欢自己能负担得起的东西。

Discipline was something he wanted banks to show, too. He battled to get them better regulated, though the weight of lobbying from the Washington swamp and, under Reagan, the pressure of the president's advisers, made this hard. He mightily defended the Glass-Steagall Act which, since the 1930s, had prevented banks from trading in securities, but lost. His failure to clamp down on reckless lending, either at home or to foreign countries, showed up in a string of debt crises during and after his tenure, culminating in the Great Recession of 2008-09.
纪律也是他想让银行展示的东西。他为银行得到更好的监管而斗争，尽管来自华盛顿的游说的压力，还有里根总统顾问的施加的压力使它变得困难。他竭尽全力为格拉斯-斯蒂格法案辩护，自20世纪30年代以来，该法案就阻止银行进行证券交易，但是失败了。无论是在国内还是在国外，他都未能压制不计后果的借贷，导致在他任期期间和任期后出现了一系列的债务危机，最终导致了2008年至2009年的大萧条。

At that low point he was called in again, the ever-reliable disciplinarian, to chair Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Although he much disliked having his name on things, it was pinned to the Volcker Rule of 2010, which barred banks from playing fast and loose with customer deposits just to boost their bottom lines. Behind almost everything he did lay concern about trust in the dollar, which also meant trust in America as the leader of the free world.
在那个低谷，他这个永远可信的纪律严明的人又被召了进来，担任奥巴马经济复苏顾问委员会主席。尽管他很不喜欢把他的名字用在什么东西上，它被用在了2010年的沃尔克规则上，沃尔克规则禁止银行为了提高利润而进行自营交易。他做的任何一件事背后几乎都隐藏着对美元的信任，这也意味着对美国作为自由世界领袖的信任。