Since its publication in 1963, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States has stood as a monumental scholarly accomplishment. Even critics of Friedman’s Monetarism have admired the work’s meticulous historical research, particularly its reconstruction of a data series on several measures of the U.S. money stock going back to 1867. Almost all subsequent researchers have accepted and employed Friedman and Schwartz’s numbers.

Recently, however, some have implied that Friedman and Schwartz fudged their data or cooked their numbers. For example, Joe Salerno, in a Mises Institute post entitled “Milton Friedman Debunked — by Econometricians,” explicitly accuses Friedman and Schwartz of “fudging" their data. Another post at the Institute for New Economic Thinking blog makes a similar claim with the title “Did Milton Friedman Cook His Numbers?”