Time & Perspective Quote by Paul A. Volcker

Volcker’s sentence is a masterclass in technocratic understatement: it frames a policy earthquake as a gentle shift in “willingness.” The key move is passive voice masquerading as inevitability. “There was more of a feeling of urgency” makes inflation sound like weather rolling in, not the product of political choices, oil shocks, wage-price dynamics, and years of stop-and-go monetary policy. That vagueness is the point. It sidesteps blame while building a moral alibi for what came next.

The phrase “forceful measures” is similarly strategic. It doesn’t name the weapon - punishingly high interest rates - or the casualties: job losses, shuttered factories, hollowed-out industrial towns. Volcker’s intent is to justify shock therapy as reluctant necessity, not ideological aggression. In a democracy, central bankers can’t campaign on pain; they can only administer it once the public has been conditioned to see the disease as worse than the cure.

Context matters: late 1970s America was living through the credibility crisis of institutions. Inflation wasn’t just an economic variable; it was a referendum on competence. When Volcker says “by the time I became chairman,” he’s drawing a line between an era of half-measures and his own mandate to restore faith in the dollar. The subtext is political permission: elites and voters had reached the point where stability, even purchased with recession, felt like the least intolerable option.

It works rhetorically because it turns coercion into caretaking. The language is calm, almost managerial, while describing an historic decision to tighten the screws until the economy confessed.