Milton Friedman Dies

[HenryTo]

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/markets/marketfeatures/10322707.html

[rffrydr]

[rffrydr]

Even the money god said that there can't be inflation until money is spent.

--For the Bugs
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

Maintained that EU would never survive serious recession. Perhaps he underestimated the WWII legacy that gave it life. Now's the test.
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[dash]

Enjoyed those links. Here's another that's worth reading:

http://www.forbes.com/global/2006/1127/016.html?partner=yahoomag

[HenryTo]

I highly recommend reading that.

And here are more links to articles regarding Dr. Milton Friedman:

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/business/17friedmancnd.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5094&en=b22d188423a336e8&hp&ex=1163739600&partner=homepage

Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/friedman/

Hoover Institution: http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/releases/4667846.html

[dash]

Talking of Gavcal, this debate between Louis Vincent Gave and Marc Faber is a year old, but many of the issues they raise are long-term and macro economic in nature. It's week-end reading but very much worth the time:

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/2006/0112.pdf

[HenryTo]

But apparently, he was still very sharp and still made great contributions. e.g. Check out the following commentary from Gavekal tonight. I had no idea that they were conversing with Dr. Friedman on a regular basis. Looking around the world today - especially in Asia - it seems that captialism has triumphed, but I am especially disturbed by the recent going-ons in Western Europe, with one of the French Presidential candidates epousing the "virtues" of protectionism and government intervention, Germany raising the VAT, and Italy raising income taxes next year, etc. I understand that this is still a far cry from the dark days when Francois Mitterrand nationalised the banking system and implemented the wealth tax but I am worried because we are still in the midst of a global boom. What is going to happen in Europe in the next global recession? I shudder to think - and I am glad I am not living in France or Germany today.

Perhaps the death of Dr. Friedman is some kind of sign? But in the meantime, the stock markets around the world are still in an uptrend and show no sign of topping out so I am not quite worried just yet. My guess is that the next crisis will occur in Europe with countries like Poland, Hungary, and Turkey getting the hardest hit - and then spreading to the Middle East as oil tanks below $50 a barrel next year. Now, that would be a sight to behold!

Anyway, here's Gavekal take on it:
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We like to think of GaveKal as an interactive network. Clients and friends around the World send us interesting ideas and entrust us to research them. In time, we turn around and present these ideas to our wider client base. Through this process, our understanding of market forces and economies is, we believe, greatly enhanced. Of course, this means that the GaveKal network is only as valuable as the people who participate in this “exchange of idea” process. And today, we are very sad to report that the GaveKal network has taken a big hit with the loss of Professor Milton Friedman.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that we would not be where we are today were it not for Pr. Friedman. And we are not even talking of the well-documented positive impact Pr. Friedman has had on policy-makers around the World. We are very much talking of Professor Friedman’s positive impact on our personal lives. In the dark days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when capitalism seemed doomed to failure to so many, a few men shined like beacons of hope. We wrote in the past how Karol Wojtyla and Ronald Reagan were such men. There is no doubt in our mind that Milton Friedman was another.

Starting in the early 1980s, after the launch of Cecogest, we were lucky enough to start corresponding with Pr. Friedman and count him as a regular reader. At a time when we were still young and “wet behind the ears”, Pr. Friedman proved very generous with his feedback, never hesitating to put pen to paper and take us to task when he found we had written something stupid. After we launched GaveKal in the late 1990s, the correspondence, thanks to the invention of email, became all the easier.

But Pr. Friedman was more than a beacon of light and more than a teacher showing a student the errors of his ways. Professor Friedman was also a sounding board for all the crazy ideas that went through the GaveKal network. In mid 2002, when we were perplexed by the fact that central banks had dumped money into the system, but that this money, unlike in the past, had had no impact on financial markets, we went to see Pr. Friedman in San Francisco and asked him whether the odd behaviour of financial markets could be linked to structural changes in the velocity of money. We half expected to be chased away with a broom, since one of the tenets of monetarism was that velocity was, over the life of a cycle, a constant. But instead, Milton Friedman helped us piece together our garbled thoughts and make sense of what was happening in the markets. Better yet, he went out and in a WSJ article (see An Interesting WSJ article from Milton Friedman) articulated in a simple page what we had been trying to formulate with modest success. With this article, Pr Friedman showed that, at the age of 91, he was still showing an understanding of the world in which we live, and an ability to convey an understanding that the rest of us can only dream of. Even more impressively, Pr Friedman once again demonstrated his ability to not stay put on a given idea and instead adapt to the economic realities around him, an impressive feat at any age, but an especially impressive one at an old age.

On this last point, the extent to which both Rose and Milton Friedman stayed active in academia and policy circles even as age crept up on them is surely an inspiration to us all, as is their nearly seventy years of marriage and close working collaboration.

The world is a much poorer place today for the loss of Pr. Friedman. This will of course be of little comfort to Rose and his children, grand-children and great-grand-children who lived in the light of such a great man and who must now feel that the World is a much darker place. We know that we do. Our thoughts and prayers are with Pr. Friedman and his family today.

[rffrydr]

Yes. But like many great individuals, lived beyond his time.

The last two decades must've been painful.

[dash]

He will definitely be missed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm