Anna Schwartz, economist who collaborated with Friedman, dies at 96 (updated)

So reports the New York Times. The Times writes,

Anna J. Schwartz, a research economist who wrote monumental works on American financial history in collaboration with the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman while remaining largely in his shadow, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Naomi Pasachoff.

Mrs. Schwartz, who earned her Ph.D. in economics at the age of 48 and dispensed policy appraisals well into her 90s, was often called the “high priestess of monetarism,” upholding a school of thought that maintains that the size and turnover of the money supply largely determines the pace of inflation and economic activity.

The Friedman-Schwartz collaboration “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” a book of nearly 900 pages published in 1963, is considered a classic. Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, called it “the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.”

The authors concluded that policy failures by the Fed, which largely controls the money supply, were one of the root causes of the Depression.

and

“Anna did all of the work, and I got most of the recognition,” Mr. Friedman said on one occasion.

After Mr. Friedman’s death in 2006, Mrs. Schwartz “became the standard-bearer” of Friedman monetarism, said Michael D. Bordo, a professor of economics at Rutgers University and for decades a Schwartz collaborator himself.

Though “not a deep theorist,” he said, Mrs. Schwartz was “probably the best woman economist of the 20th century.”

During the financial collapse that began in 2008, she was one of the few surviving economists with a firsthand recollection of the Depression. After praising early moves by Mr. Bernanke, she wrote, at age 93, a bitingly critical Op-Ed article for The New York Times in July 2009 opposing the reappointment of the Fed chairman who had been so influenced by her work.

She contended that Mr. Bernanke had erred in producing “extreme ease” in monetary policy and in failing to warn investors that new financial instruments were difficult to price.

Mrs. Schwartz also held that the government had been a bigger contributor to the crisis than had been widely realized. By her measure, the government had oversold the benefits of homeownership, pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage finance giants, to lend increasingly to lower-income borrowers and fostering exceptionally low mortgage rates.

10 days ago it was Elinor Ostrom who died, now Anna Schwartz, its a bad run for economics.

Update: James A. Dorn at Cato@Liberty notes Anna Jacobson Schwartz (1915–2012), RIP . San Francisco Chronicle on Anna Schwartz, Economist Milton Friedman's Co-Author, Dies at 96.