Paul Adolph Volcker is dead at the age of ninety-two. (Most accounts of the man suppress the middle name, though it was often pointed out with bitter glee by builders and others who were undone by his high-interest-rate policies in the early 1980s.) As I wrote in Left Business Observer when he left office in 1987, if capitalism gave out a Hero of Accumulation award, he would have been first on the honors list.

Let’s recall what he did, because all the worshipful obits will almost certainly sanitize the history. Volcker was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve by Jimmy Carter — on the recommendation of David Rockefeller — to get inflation under control. Carter’s old Georgia friend and adviser Bert Lance tried to tell him it was a mistake and that it would almost certainly cost him reelection. Lance, now remembered as little more than a Good Old Boy, if he’s remembered at all, was right. But Carter ignored him. The charms of a Rockefeller are irresistible.

Inflation is a complicated thing, and this is no place to delve into those complexities. For the purposes of this post, I’ll just say a couple of things. Part of the reason for rising inflation in the 1970s was that oil exporters had been jacking up prices — from under $4 a barrel to over $10 in the first oil shock of 1973–1974, and then from under $15 to over $30 in the second shock, 1979–1980. Other commodity-exporting countries were trying to emulate their oil-exporting colleagues. And with those commodity price moves came calls for a new world economic order — one in which the North no longer lorded it over the South, and one in which the South claimed a larger portion of global wealth.