Politics & Power Quote by Paul A. Volcker

The line lands like a lament disguised as a plainspoken recollection: a time when buying a home didn’t feel like a wager, because the wager seemed rigged in your favor. Volcker isn’t romanticizing wallpaper and lawns; he’s pinpointing a cultural contract. The house, in this framing, is both shelter and ballast - a private asset that reliably floats with inflation. That reliability is what he tags as “America,” not out of flag-waving but because it names a national expectation: steady prices, rising wages, and a middle class that could convert work into wealth without needing financial sophistication.

The intent is diagnostic. Volcker spent his career battling the inflation that, by the late 1970s, broke this assumption and forced the brutal corrective of high interest rates. When he says “you could not buy a house…without just assuming,” he’s highlighting how deeply macroeconomics seeped into everyday psychology. The subtext is that Americans weren’t merely optimistic; they were trained by policy and precedent to treat homeownership as a near-guaranteed escalator.

There’s also a quiet edge in “just - that was America,” a trailing-off that suggests the fragility of the myth. It hints at what happens when the escalator stalls: housing becomes less a shared pathway to stability and more a stratified market, where timing and credit decide who gets the hedge against inflation and who gets priced out. Volcker’s nostalgia is really a warning about how quickly a “normal” can become an artifact.