As chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. monetary history, Paul Volcker (born 1927) helped lower double-digit inflation rates in the early 1980s and ushered in an era of financial deregulation and innovation.

Paul Adolf Volcker was born in Cape May, NJ, on September 5, 1927. His father was city manager of Teaneck, NJ, and turned the town from bankruptcy to solvency. After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1949, Volcker attended Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration, earning a masters degree in political economy and government in 1951. The following year he did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics as a Rotary fellow. During summers Volcker worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and in 1952 he joined the staff there as a full-time economist.

Volcker left the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1957 to become...