In an age when Manhattan financiers own helicopters to escape the traffic on their weekend treks to the Hamptons, Paul Volcker embodies the customs of another time. The 80-year-old former chairman of the US Federal Reserve astonishes his hosts at New York dinner parties by asking where the nearest subway stop is; and, according to William Neikirk, one of his biographers, when he was running the world's most important central bank Mr Volcker ferried his dirty washing from his modest Washington crash pad to his daughter's home in Virginia to save laundry costs.

But "Tall Paul", as the shy, cigar-chomping 6ft 7in banker was nicknamed by reporters, represents bygone days in more than the penny-pinching habits of a Depression-era child. Henry Kaufman, legendary Wall Street economist, describes his friend of 50 years as "a classical person. I'm not saying that he studies philosophy, but he has deep feelings about responsibilities". Another friend, hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros, calls him "the exemplary public servant - he embodies that old idea of civic virtue".

This reputation, and Mr Volcker's defining achievement as the banker who slayed the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s, lent a special weight to the speech he delivered this week about the country's economic crisis. "The bright new financial system - for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards - has failed the test of the marketplace," he told the Economic Club of New York. Despite all the noise of the volatile markets, the world listened.