Volcker: No Quick Answers To 'Rather Profound’ Change

WASHINGTON — Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress yesterday that there are “no quick and facile answers” to the unrest in global financial markets.

In prepared testimony, Volcker said the critical backdrop to the current crisis “is the rather profound change in the locus and nature of financial intermediation over the past couple of decades.”

He said that in the U.S. especially, there has been a shift from heavily regulated commercial banks dominating financial markets, to “a more open market system, with individual credits packaged and re-packaged and traded in impersonal markets.”

— Market News International

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