Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was an American economist and the leading figure of Monetarist economics. Friedman argued that the quantity of money in circulation is the primary driver of nominal economic activity and inflation over time, and, with his collaborator Anna Schwartz, traced the severity of the Great Depression to a contraction in the money supply that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent. His 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom set out the case for stable, rule bound monetary policy and limited government intervention in economic life more broadly, and his advocacy helped shift central bank thinking in the United States and elsewhere from the late 1970s onward. Friedman received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.