| Leland B. Yeager | |
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Buchanan et Yeager |
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| Occupation | Economist, Scholar, Linguist, Author |
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Leland B. Yeager (born 4th October, 1924 in Oak Park, Illinois) is an American economist and an expert on monetary policy and international trade.[1] He graduated from Oberlin College in 1948 with an A.B. and was granted an M.A. from Columbia University in 1949 and a Ph.D. from there in 1952. He had previously served in the United States Army in World War II, translating Japanese codes. He temporarily served as the Vice President of the Interlingua Institute from 1997 to 1998 after Deanna Hammond died. He was a regular contributor to Liberty Magazine.[2] He is a Professor Emeritus at both Auburn University and the University of Virginia. His monetary writings have strongly opposed Keynesian orthodoxy and have emphasized the crucial role of money in business cycles. His 1956 essay, "A Cash-Balance Interpretation of Depression" (Southern Economic Journal 22, pp 438-47), maintained that depression was caused by "...an excess demand for money, in the sense that people want to hold more money than exists." In this, he is a member of the Monetarist school exemplified by Milton Friedman. His subsequent writings have tilted towards a laissez-faire approach to monetary reform: in his 1989 paper, "Can Monetary Disequilibrium Be Eliminated" (Cato Journal 9, pp.405-19), he advocates that government "...be banished from any role in the monetary system other than that of defining a unit of account or numeraire."