Hello, and thank you for inviting me today.
In 2002, the University of Chicago held a 90th birthday party for the great American economist
Milton Friedman. One important guest was Anna Schwartz, who four decades earlier had co-written with Friedman the landmark book A Monetary History of the United States.
It’s possible that, even among those of you prepared to give up a pleasant July evening to come to a talk by a central bank official, an 800-page tome entitled “A monetary history of [anywhere]” won’t have found its way to the very top of your holiday reading list.
But it’s actually a gripping read, especially the chapter about the Great Depression. It also has a claim as the most influential piece of economic history ever written. The book pioneered a new “narrative” approach to identifying independent changes in monetary policy – the idea being that, to separate these from the more automatic (“endogenous”) reactions of policymakers to the economy you needed to scour the historic record and understand how their decisions were actually taken.