Brendan Greeley

speaker

127 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Brendan Greeley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Unhedged · The return of monetarism? · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So...

Let us abandon Spain and at least get to the 20th century in America.

Milton Friedman, no matter if you have any issues with him as an economist, he was sort of an impeccable collector of monetary statistics.

So he produced in the 60s with Anna Schwartz, this unbelievable just doorstop of a book called A Monetary History of the United States.

And what that is, is a total summing up of all of the money in all its various forms on all bank balance sheets from the 1860s until the 1960s.

Armed with that data, he basically said, look, we can use it to protect inflation and deflation.

And it's very difficult to argue with a book like that, particularly when it's being championed by somebody who's as compelling of an arguer as Milton Friedman.

And so.

In his championing of of monetarism, he basically said, here's where I'd like to get to.

We don't know how we're going to get there, but the supply of money should increase at a regular rate every year.

So it's just not an issue.

But what you then have in the 1970s is a real spike in inflation.

And it's a problem in there.

You need tools to deal with it.

And you had someone at the Fed, Paul Volcker, who was willing to think about monetarism.

You know, Ben Bernanke actually walked through exactly what went wrong in a speech in 2006.

So he looked back at this history of monetarism at the Fed.

And so you have this attempt under Paul Volcker to explicitly restrain growth in the money supply.

They're doing exactly or almost exactly what Milton Friedman said.

Following the Friedman playbook.

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