Paul Volcker: U.S. Economic Slump Will Go Extra Innings
Paul Volcker, who was Federal Reserve Chairman from 1979 to 1987, spent some time Thursday talking about economic issues with the owners of Major League Baseball teams. Bloomberg’s Danielle Sessa wrote this morning:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, an economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, told Major League Baseball owners that it will take longer than many people expect to repair the U.S. economy.
Volcker outlined his concerns about the financial industry and consumers that are driving the slowdown, said Oakland Athletics owner Lew Wolff. He didn’t provide a timeframe of how long the decline will last, Wolff said.
“He was pretty much alerting us that this is not over yet,” said Wolff, also co-chairman of Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. “The biggest idea was that we all needed to measure the concerns of the economy in our own businesses.”
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Volcker is widely credited with ending the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and bringing inflation, which peaked at 13.5% in 1981, down to 3.2% by 1983. Sessa added:
MLB Commissioner Bud Selig invited Volcker to speak to the sport’s 30 owners at their quarterly meetings in New York. He talked for about an hour yesterday and took about a dozen questions from team officials on everything from automakers to unemployment. The media was excluded from the event.
Volcker said U.S. consumers will have to lead the rest of the world out of the global recession, according to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, a former executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“He said the same things we are getting in the papers, but when you hear it from the foremost financial authority in the world, it has a bigger impact,” Sternberg said.
Source:
“Volcker Is Said to Foresee Extended Economic Slump in U.S.”
Danielle Sessa
Bloomberg, November 21, 2008
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