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.