Milton Friedman Quotes

It was gradually learned that acceptance of a somewhat higher inflation rate would not really bring somewhat higher employment.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

The central focus of what we are doing at the Fed is to keep inflation from accelerating - and preferably decelerating.

Inflation is everywhere and anywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Having a little inflation is like being a little bit pregnant.

I may be a dreamer, but I think monetary economics should be a hot topic.

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.

Increases in money supply are what constitute inflation, and a general rise in prices is the symptom.

Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.

No central banker would disagree with the proposition that inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. Not one of them will disagree that every inflation has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the quantity of money and every deflation by a decline in the quantity of money.

First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

I understand how the economy actually works.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy's problems on its own.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

Interest rates are used to achieve overall economic stability.

My bottom line is that monetary policy should react to rising prices for houses or other assets only insofar as they affect the central bank's goal variables - output, employment, and inflation.

In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.

I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And - if it insists, it can worry about inflation.

Inflation is lower and more stable and the real business cycle fluctuations are more modest.

There are limits to monetary policy.

My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.

Models used to describe and predict inflation commonly distinguish between changes in food and energy prices - which enter into total inflation - and movements in the prices of other goods and services - that is, core inflation.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.