Arthur Burns (1904–1987)
Who They Were
Arthur Burns (1904-1987) was an American economist who chaired the Federal Reserve from 1970 to 1978, presiding over much of the 1970s 'Great Inflation.' An accomplished scholar of business cycles before entering government, he had earlier chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Eisenhower. His Fed chairmanship, however, is most often associated with the failure to contain the accelerating inflation of that decade, a task left to his successors G. William Miller and, decisively, Paul Volcker, who took over in 1979 and is credited with finally breaking it. Burns came to the central bank with a distinguished academic reputation built at Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, making his role in the inflationary 1970s a much-studied episode in central banking.
Key Contributions
Before his years at the Fed, Burns made lasting contributions to the empirical study of the economy.
- With his mentor Wesley Mitchell he co-authored Measuring Business Cycles (1946), which set out the NBER method of identifying peaks and troughs from the combined behaviour of many economic series at once.
- In 1938 he produced a study of statistical indicators of cyclical revivals, a screened list of series that had historically turned upward before general business activity did, foundational work in the development of leading economic indicators.
- He helped build the framework of leading, coincident, and lagging indicators still used to read the business cycle.
As Fed chair from 1970 to 1978 he is a central figure in the history of the 1970s inflation, an experience that shaped how later policymakers approached price stability.
On EconRecall
Fed chairman from 1970 to 1978 who presided over much of the 1970s 'Great Inflation' and earlier pioneered business-cycle measurement. Play the games that feature Arthur Burns: