Milton Friedman passes into History

Milton Friedman is dead.  Arguably one of the greatest economist of the last century.. he passes into history!

Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate economist who shaped the philosophies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and successive Federal Reserve chairmen, died of heart failure today, his daughter Janet said. He was 94.

Friedman’s view that inflation results from too much money chasing too few goods inspired a generation of central bankers, beginning with Paul Volcker, who was Fed chairman from 1979 until 1987. Alan Greenspan and Ben S. Bernanke also credit Friedman’s work as a blueprint for policy making.

“Milton Friedman will always be counted among the greatest of economists,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in a statement today. “His pioneering ideas about the nexus between economic and political freedom paved the way for prosperity and financial vitality in economies around the world.”

Friedman wrote, co-wrote or edited at least 32 books, including “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” with Anna Schwartz in 1963, and argued that the goal of monetary policy should be long-term, stable growth in the supply of money. He championed individual initiative and deregulation and influenced decisions from severing the dollar’s peg to gold in the early 1970s to ending the military draft.