A former chairman of the Federal Reserve said Europe will need years to restore economic balance, but he's rooting for both the euro and European economic integration to survive.

Paul Volcker, who chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, and currently an advisor to President Barack Obama, said the European Central Bank's intervention was the correct move, given the potential for contagion and destabilization in Europe, and that the move won't undermine the bank's independence, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.

The euro has received a ringing endorsement from a non-European source. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said the euro-zone's first monetary crisis may end up being a blessing in disguise, because it gives the monetary union a chance to establish mechanisms to deal with crises, with just a small member, Greece, serving as a test case.

Greece Not An Insuperable Problem

"I'm still a believer in the euro," Volcker told Bloomberg News, adding that the lack of a unified government to support the European Central Bank is a "structural crack" but one that's "maybe fortunately it's tested with a country as small as Greece, which doesn't present an insuperable problem."

The White House sent its version of the Volker Rule bill to Congress for debate. The Volker Rule, named for former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volker, would restrict the actions of big banks.

The Volker Rule would ban banks that take federally insured deposits from investing in hedge funds or private equity funds and from making trades that are for the profit of the banks, not for their customers, better known as proprietary trading.

One trend that has to reverse for the U.S. economy to return to premiere economy status: the trend of top talent toward financial services and away from other fields, including engineering, and the natural sciences.

The income gap between those who went into finance (for example as hedge fund managers and/or product designers of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other investment instruments) and those who went in to mechanical engineering or civil engineering widened considerably during the past 20 years: and where do think a lot of the talent went? You guessed it, in to designing derivatives, etc.

Another day, more wonderful news. If the rally last week left you feeling peppy, alas, global debt markets didn't share your enthusiasm -- witness the extremely tepid reception a new round of U.S. and U.K. debt offerings got from buyers today. Air travel numbers were horrific, indicating, by some opinions, a dire summer for the perennially strapped industry.

President Obama wants to get advice from outside the regular Washington circles, so he'll be announcing today a new team of outside economic advisers headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Dubbed the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the group will include GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt, Caterpillar Chairman Jim Owens, Former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, TIAA-CREF President Roger Ferguson, Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swenson, President of Oracle Corp. Charles Phillips, Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein and University of California, Berkeley Professor Laura Tyson.

Labor will also be represented by Richard Trumpka of the AFL-CIO and Anna Burger of the Service Employees International Union. Others members include Mark Gallogly, founder and managing partner of Centerbridge Partners, Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group, John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and Monica Loranzo, publisher and CEO of La Opinion.

The board will meet for two years and be modeled after the foreign intelligence board created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In setting up this board the White House said, "The board will bring a diverse set of perspectives and voices from different parts of the country and different sectors of the economy to bear in the formulation and evaluation of economic policy."

81-year old former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is at the top of the list of candidates for the role of Car Czar that would be created by a bailout of the auto industry.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has suggested that he would be a choice "acceptable to both sides" and a person close to Mr. Volcker told (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal that Volcker would "probably do it" with enough persuasion.

Mr. Volcker already serves as a key adviser to President-elect Obama, but lacks any experience with the auto industry. There is considerable debate about whether auto experience is necessary to serve as competent car czar.

To me though, the auto industry needs a more charismatic leader to be the face and voice of its turnaround plan. There's no question that Volcker is brilliant and respected, but let's face it: He's an octogenarian economist, not exactly the kind of person we can look to to breathe life into an industry that needs something to get it going.

Jack Welch has also been named as a possibility, but he seems a little bit washed up. How about a visionary leader who's led a turnaround in a completely different industry? Steve Jobs, perhaps, if he could be persuaded for the good of his country?

The fact is that the bureaucratic details of the bailout will be handled by staff: What is needed is vision and excitement.

The first thing a new president must do is to pick his team. Given the state of the economy, the most important selection at this point is that of Secretary of the Treasury. What criteria should President-elect Obama use to pick his next Treasury Secretary? Here are three:

• Does the person have the respect of Wall Street?
• Does the person know the current players and issues well?
• Does the person have the energy to run at full speed in what promises to be a 7-day a week position?

Obama is reportedly considering Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Based on the criteria I've listed, the right person for the job is Geithner. Summers is an academic with an abrasive personality who is not steeped in the realities of Wall Street. Volcker is reportedly close to Obama and was widely respected on Wall Street, but at 81 he lacks the energy for the job.

Every once in while during a crisis or history-altering event, you run across a quote or an observation that sort of summarizes events on the ground, in a nutshell. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker articulated one such observation during a recent chat he had with PBS's Charlie Rose.

"It seems to me what our nation needs is more civil engineers and electrical engineers and fewer financial engineers," Volcker said.

U.S.: a decade of descent

And there you have it -- the United States' decade of descent, in a nutshell. Volcker's observation speaks volumes about where the United States economy -- and the nation, at large, for that matter -- is today.

For reasons that historians will undoubtedly debate for decades (globalization, automation, flawed public policies, inadequate regulations, overconsumption, the availability of foreign capital, greed) the United States embarked on a financing boom -- creating an increasing array of creative and untenable mortgage types, accompanied by an equally problematic set of mortgage backed securities. It generated an unsustainable housing bubble, which ended as all bubbles do -- badly -- triggering the global financial crisis.

And yet, all the while, as Volcker observed, public investment in infrastructure -- the physical backbone of the economy, of the nation, really -- declined. That infrastructure is now in a state of disrepair. The nation's schools, hospitals, roads/bridges/mass transit systems/air travel system and even our electric grid are inadequate to meet the nation's current requirements, let alone the requirements of an expanding, vibrant, dynamic, twenty-first century economy.

Inflation is roaring to levels not seen since 1981. The not-so-surprising result is that at 0.8%, according to Bloomberg News, the inflation gobbled up much of the stimulus checks that went out to consumers earlier in the year.

Economists had forecast spending would rise 0.4%, after an originally reported 0.8% increase in May -- the actual result was 0.6%. That should not have surprised policy makers. When you cut interest rates from 5.25% to 2% and then run record deficits, you are just asking for inflation. And that's what the economy delivered.

But isn't it the job of the Fed to keep inflation from getting out of control? Yes. And that's just what Paul Volcker tried to cure in the early 1980s after a decade of stagflation. He raised the Fed Funds rate to nearly 20% and that broke the inflation rate that peaked the last time it was as rampant as it was last month. And it sparked an 18 year stock market rally that took the Dow from 800 to 11,500.