Anna Schwartz, 1915–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

When legendary economist Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976, many in the field said it should have also gone to his frequent co-author, Anna Schwartz. “Anna did all of the work,” Friedman himself later said, “and I got most of the recognition” for the 1963 classic A Monetary History of the United States. That groundbreaking book created a new consensus that the Federal Reserve’s policy failures, rather than the 1929 stock market crash, triggered the Great Depression. Though Schwartz was little known outside of economic circles, her collaboration with Friedman and her other works of monetary history made her the most celebrated and influential female economist of the past century.

Born in the Bronx in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Schwartz was drawn to economics in high school, and graduated from Barnard College at age 18, said The New York Times. In 1941, she joined the National Bureau of Economic Research, the country’s “semiofficial arbiter of business cycles,” as a research assistant, and went on to work there for more than 70 years. At 48, she earned her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.

Schwartz was one of the foremost experts on U.S. monetary history, said Bloomberg.com. In recent years, she emerged as an “outspoken critic” of the Fed’s bailouts of indebted financial institutions in 2008, and opposed Ben Bernanke’s reappointment as Fed chief in 2009. “It’s like the only lesson the Federal Reserve took from the Great Depression was to flood the market with liquidity,” she said in 2008. “Well, it isn’t working.”