Paul Volcker, who helped shape US economic policy for more than six decades, most notably by leading the Federal Reserve's brute-force campaign to subdue inflation in the late 1970s and early '80s, died on Sunday in New York. He was 92.

Volcker, a towering, taciturn and somewhat rumpled figure, arrived in Washington as America's post-war economic hegemony was beginning to crumble. He would devote his professional life to wrestling with the consequences.