Acceptance speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, for the 2026 Paul A. Volcker Lifetime Achievement Award at the 42nd Annual NABE Economic Policy Conference in Washington DC, United States

Washington DC, 23 February 2026

There is perhaps no greater question in political philosophy than whether history is shaped by individuals or by the forces that carry them. Tolstoy devoted the philosophical heart of War and Peace to this question.

His answer was uncompromising: the so-called great men of history were not its authors but its instruments.

This is a powerful thesis. But in the history of economic institutions, the evidence points both ways. Institutions are shaped by the laws they are built upon and the mandates they are given. But they are also shaped, sometimes decisively, by the people who serve them.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the story of Paul Volcker, whom this lecture honours.

What Volcker did in the early 1980s went beyond taming inflation. He transformed…