Politics & Power Quote by Paul A. Volcker

A throwaway clause like "it wasn't so bad" is doing heavy political labor. Volcker is speaking in the cool register of an economist, but the line is really a method for laundering severity into acceptability: if the benchmark is "a lot of countries" and specifically "Latin American standards", then the United States (or some U.S. policy outcome) can be framed as merely bruised rather than battered. The move is comparative, not descriptive. It invites the listener to downgrade outrage into relief.

The subtext is both technocratic and moral. Technocratic, because it treats national experience as data points on a global distribution: pain becomes something you normalize with a reference class. Moral, because the reference class is not neutral. "Latin American standards" carries an implicit stereotype of chronic instability, inflation, debt crises, and political volatility. It quietly turns Latin America into the cautionary tale that makes domestic hardship look mature, orderly, even responsible. The compliment to the home country is embedded in the mild condescension toward the other.

Contextually, Volcker's career sits at the intersection of inflation, austerity, and credibility politics. When central bankers justify harsh medicine, they rarely say, "We chose a policy that hurt people". They say, "Compared to the alternatives, this is contained". Volcker's phrasing is the patrician version of that argument: a calibration of expectations that defends institutional authority. It works because it sounds modest and empirical while smuggling in a hierarchy of nations and a permission structure for suffering.