A free public seminar Friday morning is the latest in a series sponsored by the Windsor History of Economic Thought Club.

David Laidler, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, will deliver “Two Crises, Two Ideas and One Question” at 10 a.m. October 26 in room G125, Chrysler Hall North.

In the cases of both the Great Depression and what he terms the Great Recession of 2007, Laidler says, much of the damage to the real economy had been inflicted before they struck, under circumstances where monetarist indicators were giving no warning signals of major trouble.

A leading scholar in the monetarist tradition of analysis of the crucial role of money in determining inflation and short-run economic fluctuations, Dr. Laidler was named a fellow of the Canadian Economics Association in 2012. He has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1982, a distinguished fellow of the History of Economics Society since 2009, and served as president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1987-88. Through his publications, Laidler has advocated that macroeconomic theorists and policy analysts have a historical perspective on how their field has evolved.

In Fall 2011, the Department of Economics created the History of Economic Thought Club as a forum to discussthe history of economic ideas among professors and students of different areas and levels. More information is available on the club’s Web site.