He was happy, even at the Fed, to wear crumpled suits, live in a students' apartment block and fly coach back to New York and the family at weekends. (His salary had fallen by half when he went from the New York Fed to Washington, and even when he returned to Wall Street in 1987, making $1m a year, he kept his old pinchpenny ways.) As for discipline, he smoked AC Grenadier cigars not only because they were cheap, at a quarter each, but also because he had trained himself to like only what he could afford.
保羅·沃爾克很開心，即使在美聯儲，他都穿著發皺的西裝，生活在學生公寓，周末乘長途飛機回紐約和家人團聚。當他從紐約的美聯儲去到華盛頓時，他的工資已經降了一半。甚至在19887年回到華爾街時，年薪100萬的他依然維持著自己吝嗇的生活方式。至于紀律性，保羅·沃爾克抽AC擲彈兵雪茄，不僅因為它們便宜，25美分一支，也是因為他訓練自己只喜歡自己能負擔得起的東西。
Discipline was something he wanted banks to show, too. He battled to get them better regulated, though the weight of lobbying from the Washington swamp and, under Reagan, the pressure of the president's advisers, made this hard. He mightily defended the Glass-Steagall Act which, since the 1930s, had prevented banks from trading in securities, but lost. His failure to clamp down on reckless lending, either at home or to foreign countries, showed up in a string of debt crises during and after his tenure, culminating in the Great Recession of 2008-09.
紀律也是他想讓銀行展示的東西。他為銀行得到更好的監管而斗爭，盡管來自華盛頓的游說的壓力，還有里根總統顧問的施加的壓力使它變得困難。他竭盡全力為格拉斯-斯蒂格法案辯護，自20世紀30年代以來，該法案就阻止銀行進行證券交易，但是失敗了。無論是在國內還是在國外，他都未能壓制不計后果的借貸，導致在他任期期間和任期后出現了一系列的債務危機，最終導致了2008年至2009年的大蕭條。
At that low point he was called in again, the ever-reliable disciplinarian, to chair Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Although he much disliked having his name on things, it was pinned to the Volcker Rule of 2010, which barred banks from playing fast and loose with customer deposits just to boost their bottom lines. Behind almost everything he did lay concern about trust in the dollar, which also meant trust in America as the leader of the free world.
在那個低谷，他這個永遠可信的紀律嚴明的人又被召了進來，擔任奧巴馬經濟復蘇顧問委員會主席。盡管他很不喜歡把他的名字用在什么東西上，它被用在了2010年的沃爾克規則上，沃爾克規則禁止銀行為了提高利潤而進行自營交易。他做的任何一件事背后幾乎都隱藏著對美元的信任，這也意味著對美國作為自由世界領袖的信任。
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