Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman is known as one of the top economists in the world. He has a Ph. D. from Columbia University, won a Noble Memorial Prize in economics and has also been awarded many honorary degrees by other Universities in the

United States. As you can tell, Milton Friedman has played a significant part in helping to solve the economy problems of the world. You've probably heard all about his accomplishments and awards he has received, but what about how Milton

Friedman played a very important role in helping us get into a huge national debt? This paper will discuss how Milton Friedman played a negative role in our economy. When the Great Depression hit worldwide, it was up to the economists to explain it and to devise a cure for it. A person named John Maynard Keynes came up with an explanation to the economic slump that was so simple people did not think it would work. Keynes explanation was something like this; in a normal economy, there is a high level of employment, and everyone is spending their earnings as usual. This means there is a circular flow of money in the economy, as my spending becomes part of your earnings, and your spending becomes part of my earnings. Suppose something happens to alter consumers confidence in the economy. Worried consumers may then try to weather the coming economic hardship by saving their money, but because my spending is part of your earnings, my decision to hoard money makes things worse for you and you, responding to your own difficult times, will start hoarding money too, making things even worse for me. So actually, everything is related. People hoard money in difficult time s, but times become more difficult when people hoard money. That was basically how

Keynes explained the recession. He also came up with a solution to it.

The cure for this, was for the central bank to expand the money supply.

Keynes said, "by putting more bills in people's hands, consumer confidence would return, people would spend, and the circular flow of money would be reestablished(Keynes, 232)." That was the cure and explanation to the recession, but what about the depressions? Keynes believed that depressions were recessions that had fallen into a "liquidity trap(Keynes, 240)." A liquidity trap is when people hoard money and refuse to spend no matter how much the government tries to expand the money ...

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...tional debt rising to $3 trillion by the time he left office. Paul Volcker, Chairman of the

Federal Reserve Board, battled inflation during the severe recession of 1980-82 through the Keynesian method of raising interest rates and tightening the money supply. When inflation looked defeated in 1982, he immediately got rid of the interest rate and flooded the economy with money. A few months later, the economy came to life, in a recovery that would last over seven years. The

American experience was in direct contrast to Great Britain's. As a result, most economists abandoned monetarist theory.

In the end, Milton's Monetary theory was proven unfeasible. Instead of helping fight the recession, Milton helped put us in it. After reading this paper, one would think that Milton Friedman is a bad economists, but the truth is, he is a highly intelligent man. Even though he was partly responsible for putting our economy into a recession during the Reagan administration, he is also responsible for helping our economy through many other hardships. Although

Milton Friedman is considered as one of the worlds greatest Economists, we all make mistakes sometimes right?