Milton Friedman Quotes
The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 38.
The ‘Fed’ refers to the Federal Reserve Board, the strength of which lies in its independence from politics. Some, however, believe that there should not be any entity that performs a major function in our society which is not accountable to the Executive Branch or the Congress or both.
If the economy is strong voters will often ignore of forgive leadership failures. But not in a poor economy.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
