Keeping At It

The memoir Paul Volcker published at ninety-one, a year before he died. It runs from Depression-era New Jersey through the Treasury, the collapse of Bretton Woods, and the Federal Reserve chairmanship in which he broke the inflation of the 1970s by pushing interest rates to levels that caused a deep recession and made him widely hated before he was widely credited. The book’s organising conviction is in its subtitle: that sound money and competent, non-captured public institutions are the same project, and that the second is the harder and more neglected half.

Why it’s on the list: The inflation fight from the inside, by the person who took the political cost of it — and a sustained argument about institutional competence rather than just monetary policy.

Where I saw it: @tylercosgrove’s October 15, 2025 list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner.

Connections

• Banking — the Fed chairmanship and the later rule that carries his name.
• Regulation — his post-crisis work and the book’s case for capable supervision.
• Government — the “good government” half of the subtitle, and the half Volcker thought was losing.
• Debt — the fiscal backdrop to the inflation he was fighting.
• Economic History — the section of the corpus this belongs to.