Monetarists - Introduction

Monetarists are a group of economists so named because of their preoccupation with money and its effects. The most famous Monetarist is Milton Friedman who developed much of the Monetarist theory we learn.

Monetarism is very closely allied with the classical school of thought. It is essentially an extension of classical theory which was developed in the 1960s and 1970s to try to explain a new economic phenomenon - stagflation. Stagflation was an expression coined to try to explain two simultaneous economic problems - stagnation and inflation. It could perhaps have been called 'inflanation' but that sounds more like a medical problem than an economic one.

Much of the Monetarists' work revolved around the role of expectations in determining inflation, and a key part of their theory was the development of the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve. For more details on this and other areas of monetarism, try the links below or at the foot of the page or in the side panel.

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