Fed's Volcker comes home to New Jersey

Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman who tamed inflation, doomed Jimmy Carter's Presidency, and advises Obama, came home to New Jersey this week to help raise money for the nonprofit ISLES development group and its latest project, converting a century-old Hamilton Township textile mill into housing. Story here.

Said Volcker, "I was just in China and everyone is saying there is so much opportunity there for development.  After my speech, someone came up to me and said, no, the real opportunity is in Africa," according to notes by ISLES spokesman Ted Deutsch.

"But as we can see here today, there is plenty of opportunity for development right here in America – in Trenton and Hamilton Township."

Volcker, son of a Teaneck city manager who scrambled to keep the city from going bankrupt in the grim 1930s, has backed ISLES since the 1980s. The group does "training, and housing rehabilitation, and community rehabilitation -- and most important, human rehabilitation", Volcker said.