How Milton Friedman came to Australia : A case study of class-based political business cycles

Thirty years ago, in April 1975, Milton Friedman, came to Australia to declare that the world economic situation manifestly unsound.[1] Friedman asserted on that trip what Michael Kalecki predicted in his 1943 article would be the response of ?captains of industry? to Keynesian macroeconomic policies; it was that ??government expenditure financed by borrowing will cause inflation? (Kalecki, 1990: 348). A chorus of Australian businessmen and mandarin economists came out in support of Friedman, leading to the demise of Keynesian macroeconomic policy and the rise of neo-liberal policies. Milton Friedman, at the time was the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; and acknowledged head of the ?Chicago School? of monetary economics, called ?monetarism?. A year later, in 1976, Friedman received the ?Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel?, confirming his status in the financial community and the neo-liberal mainstream of the economics profession during this period. At the time he was also a regular contributor to Newsweek magazine.