Jacob Viner, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago Monetary Tradition: A Reconsideration

The relationship of Jacob Viner’s monetary economics to (a) the monetary economics that characterized the Chicago tradition of the early 1930s and (b) Milton Friedman’s monetarist framework of the 1950s and after has long been the focus of doctrinal research.1 Friedman (1972) provided evidence showing that Viner had been a trenchant critic of Federal Reserve policies during the Depression and a proponent of monetary policies that worked through the banking system, views that, Friedman claimed, established a direct linkage with his monetarist economics. Thus, after presenting Viner’s views on the effectiveness of open-market operations and on his criticisms of the Fed’s policies in the early 1930s, Friedman (1972: 940–41) stated:. © 2022 by Duke University Press.