The government didn’t miss inflation, they ignored it
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell looked calm when he testified before the Senate Banking Committee in February 2021. He’d just been asked by the folksy Louisiana senator John Kennedy whether he had concerns about the dollar supply being the highest it had been since 1946. “Right now, I would say the growth of M2, which is quite substantial, doesn't really have important implications for the economic outlook,” Powell stated. “M2 was removed some years ago from the standard list of leading indicators, and just that classic relationship between monetary aggregates and economic growth in the size of the economy, it just no longer holds. We've had big growth of monetary aggregates at various times without inflation, so something we have to unlearn, I guess.
