Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 ¨C November 16, 2006) was an American economist known for his studies of macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic history, statistics, and advocacy of free capitalism. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for his contributions in the fields of consumption analysis, theory of monetary supply and history, and the complexity of stability policies, and was known as one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. He advocated a free market economy, in most cases opposed to governmental intervention, whose theory became one of the main foundations of liberalism, and had a great impact on the economic and monetary policy of Ronald Reagan and many other countries starting in the 1980s.