My biggest wish for the Autumn is that David Laidler will win the Nobel Prize in Economics next week for …

“…his contribution to monetary economics and the history of economic thought”

There is unfortunately little chance that that will happen, but it is about time that a historian of economic thought is awarded the Nobel Prize.

While we are awaiting for the good news (fingers crossed) you should read David’s latest paper – Reassessing the Thesis of the Monetary History. This is the abstract:

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed’s failure as a lender of last resort at its onset, and the ineptitude of its policies thereafter. This explanation is reassessed in the light of events since 2007, and it is argued that its plausibility emerges enhanced, even though policy debates in recent years have paid more attention to interest rates and credit markets than to Friedman and Schwartz’s key variable, the quantity of money.

David of course was the research assistant for Friedman and Schwartz when they wrote Monetary History.

HT Mike Belongia

PS don’t tell me that the Nobel Prize in Economics is not a real Nobel Prize – I don’t care.