7 When Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker embarked on his campaign to break the back of U.S. inflation in October 1979, he drew on this existing work in formulating and defending his program. (Volcker, by the way, was Princeton class of 1949, and he wrote his senior thesis on the Federal Reserve.)
In his first testimonies and speeches after becoming Chairman, Volcker emphasized many of the arguments developed by academics for how inflation interfered with the efficient working of the economy. And he drew on Friedman's monetarist approach, both in its advocacy of low and stable inflation and in its prescriptions for policy implementation.