Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who tackled American inflation in the 1970s and '80s and later lent his name to landmark Wall Street reforms, died on Sunday, news agency AFP reported, quoting media reports.
Volcker, who headed the US central bank from 1975 to 1987, was 92. The cause was reportedly complications from prostate cancer, the reports said, citing his daughter Janice Zima.
In a career spanning the immediate post-War decades to the financial crisis, Volcker advised US leaders from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.
Volcker persuaded lawmakers following the 2008 financial meltdown to impose tighter restrictions on the conduct of banks.
Volcker’s Report Caused Natwar Singh’s Removal
The then foreign minister of India, Natwar Singh, was removed from his post in November 2005 after pressure mounted over allegations that he and the governing Congress party had collected kickbacks from the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq.
Singh was cited in a report by a United Nations commission headed by Paul Volcker, which investigated accusations of abuse of the oil-for-food program.
A grandson of German immigrants, Volcker was born in 1927 in Cape May, New Jersey, and developed a love of fly-fishing.
After leaving the Fed in 1987, Volcker became chief executive of the investment bank Wolfensohn & Company.
A father of two, he remarried in 2010 at the age of 83, taking his long-serving assistant as his bride 12 years after the death of his wife Barbara.
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