PASSINGS : Karl Brunner; Economist in Monetarist School

Karl Brunner, 73, an influential economist and leading exponent of monetarism, who many economists credited with helping steer the Federal Reserve System toward tight controls of the money supply in the early 1980s, which helped to halt the inflation of the late 1970s. (Monetarists believe government’s only important role in the economy is to regulate the money supply through a slow but steady growth rate.) The Swiss-born Brunner taught at several universities before coming to the University of Rochester and held a joint professorship there and at the University of Bern in Switzerland for most of his career. In Rochester, N.Y., on Tuesday.