Inflation Is Always And Everywhere A

Friedman stated this proposition in his 1970 essay The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory, based on his Wincott Memorial Lecture of that year. It became the central claim of monetarism: that sustained increases in the price level are always caused by excessive growth in the money supply, and that other factors (oil shocks, wages, import prices) can only produce temporary price increases, not persistent inflation. The claim was controversial — it placed the blame for inflation squarely on central banks — and shaped the policies of Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve in the early 1980s.