In 2002, three months after Milton Friedman turned ninety, a celebratory conference was convened at the school that had become synonymous with his ideas. Ben Bernanke, then a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, delivered a talk at the University of Chicago on “Depression and Recovery.” It had been thirty-nine years since Friedman published “A Monetary History of the United States,” his blockbuster account of how the Fed’s missteps caused the Great Depression, and twenty-five years since he won the Nobel Prize. After Bernanke gave an encomium to Friedman’s long and storied career, he was moved to add a flourish, “abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve.” “Regarding the Great Depression,” he told Friedman, “you’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But, thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
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