Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System

Friedman tended not to ingratiate himself with central bankers. When invited by Lionel Robbins to deliver two lectures at the LSE in May 1952, Friedman (22 February 1952) explained to Robbins that he would like to use the opportunity to discuss ‘the question of automatic vs. discretionary monetary policy, in which connection I should display the Federal Reserve Board as the horrible example’.1 In his published work he was hardly more flattering: it would be ‘politically intolerable’ to have independent central banks because ‘Money is too important to be left to central bankers.’ Friedman (1968a [1962], 173, 178, 182) approvingly noted that central bankers ‘tended to oppose many of the proposals for extending the scope of government’ which he regarded as a ‘requisite for a free society’. Yet when he read the memoirs of prominent central bankers he realised how ‘thoroughly dictatorial and totalitarian’ some of them tended to be.