[2] President Nixon nominated him to succeed William McChesney Martin as Chairman of the Federal Reserve and later renominated him for another term.

Burns was born in Stanislau (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Austrian Poland (Galicia), a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1904 to Polish-Jewish parents, Sarah Juran and Nathan Burnseig, who worked as a house painter.

During his tenure, Burns began the academic tradition of determining recessions, a role continued by the NBER's business cycle dating committee.

In the late 1940s, Burns asked Milton Friedman, then a professor at the University of Chicago, to join the NBER as a researcher of the role of money in the business cycle.

Burns's detailed macroeconomic analysis influenced Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's classic work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

The newly created position held cabinet rank and was meant as a placeholder until Burns could be appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

[12] As expected, Burns was appointed to replace the outgoing William McChesney Martin as Fed Chairman in November 1969 and resigned his post in the Nixon administration.

In his book Six Crises, Nixon later blamed his defeat in 1960 in part on Fed policy and the resulting tight credit conditions and slow growth.

Reflecting in his diary about a 1971 meeting attended by himself, Nixon, Treasury Secretary John Connally, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Burns wrote: The President looked wild; talked like a desperate man; fulminated with hatred against the press; took some of us to task – apparently meaning me or [chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Paul] McCraken or both – for not putting a gay and optimistic face on every piece of economic news, however discouraging; propounded the theory that confidence can be best generated by appearing confident and coloring, if need be, the news.

[9]There was significant inflation during this period, which Nixon attempted to manage through wage and price controls while the Fed under Burns increased the money supply.

From the Board of Governors meeting minutes of November 1970, Burns believed that: ...prospects were dim for any easing of the cost-push inflation generated by union demands.

However, the Federal Reserve could not do anything about those influences except to impose monetary restraint, and he did not believe the country was willing to accept for any long period an unemployment rate in the area of 6 percent.

[2] Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett gives Burns poor marks for his tenure as Fed chairman because the inflationary forces that began in 1970 took more than a decade to resolve.

The only disagreement among economists is whether Burns fully understood the mistakes he was making, or was so wedded to incorrect Keynesian theories that he didn't realize what he was doing.

[21]In more recent years, the famous quote, "The ultimate purpose of an economy is to produce more consumer goods," has erroneously been attributed to Burns in popular culture.