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In April 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan assigned Volcker, who was a director of the United Nations Association of the USA from 2000 to 2004, to the UN Independent Inquiry to research possible corruption in the Iraqi Oil for Food program. In the report summarizing its research, Volcker criticized Kojo Annan, son of Kofi Annan, and the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection SA, Kojo's employer, for trying to conceal their relationship.
From 1969 to 1974, Volcker served as under-secretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs. He then became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979, leaving to take up the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve in August 1979. Volcker's Fed is widely credited with ending the US's stagflation crisis of the 1970s by limiting the growth of the money supply, abandoning the previous policy of targeting interest rates.
In 1975, Volcker had become a senior fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. After leaving the Federal Reserve in 1987, he became chairman of the prominent New York investment banking firm, Wolfensohn & Co.
As of October 2006, Volcker is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty, and is a member of the Trilateral Commission. He has had a long association with the Rockefeller family, not only with his positions at Chase Bank and the Trilateral Commission, but also through membership of the Trust Committee of Rockefeller Group, Inc., which he joined in 1987.
April 16, 2007