Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose theories reshaped monetary policy and championed individual liberty worldwide, died of heart failure in San Francisco. He was 94. His wife and two children survive him.
Friedman's 1963 co-authored study of US monetary history argued that the Federal Reserve's mismanagement of the money supply, not the stock market crash itself, caused the Great Depression. He also demonstrated that disciplined monetary policy supports long-term growth, directly challenging the Keynesian view that inflation was an acceptable price for full employment. Central banks across the globe adopted his framework, and the US Federal Reserve has operated along Friedman's principles since 1979.
A founder of the University of Chicago's free-market economics tradition, Friedman advised Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as they cut taxes, reduced spending, and privatized public services in the 1980s. His ideas on private pension accounts have since been adopted in countries ranging from Sweden to Chile, while his flat-tax proposals took hold in Russia, the Baltic states, and much of Eastern Europe.
Thatcher credited Friedman with reviving "the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten." Former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar, who introduced one of the world's first flat income taxes, said Friedman's book Free to Choose was the only economics text he had ever read. Laar received the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize earlier in 2006.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in November 2006, in its own words.