A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960

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Princeton University Press, Sep 2, 2008 - Business & Economics - 888 pages

Writing in the June 1965 issue of theEconomic Journal, Harry G. Johnson begins with a sentence seemingly calibrated to the scale of the book he set himself to review: "The long-awaited monetary history of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental scholarly achievement--monumental in its sheer bulk, monumental in the definitiveness of its treatment of innumerable issues, large and small . . . monumental, above all, in the theoretical and statistical effort and ingenuity that have been brought to bear on the solution of complex and subtle economic issues."


Friedman and Schwartz marshaled massive historical data and sharp analytics to support the claim that monetary policy--steady control of the money supply--matters profoundly in the management of the nation's economy, especially in navigating serious economic fluctuations. In their influential chapter 7, The Great Contraction--which Princeton published in 1965 as a separate paperback--they address the central economic event of the century, the Depression. According to Hugh Rockoff, writing in January 1965: "If Great Depressions could be prevented through timely actions by the monetary authority (or by a monetary rule), as Friedman and Schwartz had contended, then the case for market economies was measurably stronger."


Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for work related to A Monetary History as well as to his other Princeton University Press book, A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957).

 

Contents

1 Introduction
2
2 The Greenback Period
15
3 Silver Politics and the Secular Decline in Prices 187997
89
4 Gold Inflation and Banking Reform 18971914
135
5 Early Years of the Federal Reserve System 191421
189
6 The High Tide of the Reserve System 192129
240
7 The Great Contraction 192933
299
8 New Deal Changes in the Banking Structure and Monetary Standard
420
10 World War II Inflation September 1939August 1948
546
11 Revival of Monetary Policy 194860
592
12 The Postwar Rise in Velocity
639
13 A Summing Up
676
Appendixes
701
Directors Comment
809
Indexes
815
Copyright

9 Cyclical Changes 193341
493

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