Economist Anna Schwartz dies at 96

Anna Schwartz, an economist and co-author with Milton Friedman of a book on monetary policy that shaped the views of central bankers including Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, has died. She was 96.

She died Thursday at her home in Manhattan after a long illness, said her daughter, Naomi Pasachoff.

The first book she wrote with Friedman, "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960," had "critical influence" on the outlook "of a generation of policy makers," Bernanke said in 2003, when he was a Fed governor. Published in 1963, the book advanced the idea that the Great Depression was triggered by the central bank's reduction in the U.S. money supply from 1928 until the early 1930s. That contradicted the prevailing view that it resulted from the 1929 stock-market crash.

Schwartz wrote or edited nine books on monetary policy, including three with Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. -- Bloomberg News