This is a great piece by journalist Penn Bullock in Reason Online rasing the question of Benanke’s intellectual influences. John Maynard Keynes? The great Milton Friedman?

The New York Times, for instance, has identified Bernanke as “a student if not necessarily a devotee of the British economist John Maynard Keynes.” But Bernanke actually spent most of his academic career elaborating on Friedman’s interpretation of the Great Depression. Though his research sometimes strayed into non-monetary subjects, it was always “an embellishment of the Friedman-Schwartz story… and no way contradict[ed] the basic logic of their analysis,” as Bernanke assured Friedman at his birthday party.

But an even more interesting point in this article is the contradiction exposed by Bullock between Milton Friedman and 1963 co-author of The Monetary History of the United States, Anna Schwartz.

Their chapter on the Great Depression was spun off into a standalone book, The Great Contraction: 1929-1933, an epic revisionist history that changed America’s understanding of the causes of the Depression. Friedman and Schwartz contended that the Federal Reserve—not capitalism or Wall Street—was to blame for the dismal ’30s.

But today, it’s not clear that they would agree about what they really meant and about what it means for the current crisis.

Which brings us back to the question of Ben Bernanke’s economic ideology. When it comes to the Great Depression, Bernanke is a disciple of Friedman and Schwartz. In 2002, at Friedman’s 90th birthday party at the University of Chicago, Bernanke was effusive. “Among economic scholars,” he began, “Friedman has no peers.” He developed the “leading and most persuasive” explanation of the Depression, whose impact on economics and the popular mind “cannot be overstated.”
At the conclusion of his encomium, Bernanke made a stunning and ominous apology on behalf of the Federal Reserve. “I would like to say to Milton and Anna…regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
Schwartz was also present at the birthday party. “I’m sure he was sincere when he said that,” she recalled. And Bernanke stayed true to his word. In 2006, he replaced Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan had engineered an era of non-inflationary loose credit that won Friedman’s endorsement: “There is no other period of comparable length in which the Federal Reserve System has performed so well,” Friedman declared in The Wall Street Journal.

Read the whole thing here and dive into this very current debate — even though it started decades ago. It is really interesting.