Wealth & Money Quote by Paul A. Volcker

Volcker’s line lands like a blunt instrument, and that’s the point. He isn’t reaching for metaphor or drama; he’s trying to pin history to the wall with a nail of factual finality. “Biggest” and “most sustained” aren’t just superlatives, they’re a prosecutorial framing: this wasn’t a brief fever or a technical nuisance, it was a long-running institutional failure that rewired expectations across the economy. Inflation, in that era, wasn’t merely rising prices; it was a collapse of trust in money as a stable measuring stick.

The subtext is a rebuke to the comfortable stories policymakers tell themselves. Sustained inflation implies permission. It suggests that the political system, and the central bank that served it, chose short-term relief over long-term credibility for years, letting wage-price spirals and “inflation psychology” harden into routine. Volcker is also quietly justifying the severity of what came next: the shock therapy of steep interest-rate hikes, recession-level pain, and a deliberate willingness to be unpopular. If the disease is unprecedented, the treatment can’t be gentle.

Context does the rest of the work. Spoken by the Fed chair who became synonymous with breaking inflation in the early 1980s, the sentence doubles as a moral ledger: here’s how bad it got; here’s why drastic action was defensible. The economy of the phrasing mirrors Volcker’s technocratic persona, but the intent is political in the deeper sense: to define the period as a cautionary tale about what happens when democratic pressure meets monetary denial.