In The Wall Street Journal on April 29, another AEI economist, John L. Chapman, took the exact opposite position from John Makin. Chapman suggested the Fed “should soon begin a series of rate increases.” The title was “The Fed Must Strengthen the Dollar,” but that is not what he wrote. Chapman just advocated “a stable dollar.”

The dollar was stable in March and April. The Fed’s index of the dollar’s value against a broad basket of currencies (Jan. 1997=100) was 95.84 on March 6 and 95.81 on April 29. The index against major currencies (1973=100) remained close to 70. That was just two months, of course. But those were the months when we were deluged by editorials blaming rising prices of food and oil on “the falling dollar.” In any case, if the goal is being achieved with current Fed policy, then changing that policy would mean deviating from that goal.

Chapman, like some other economists, sees “inflation warnings” in rapid growth of a measure of money supply (or demand) known as MZM (money with zero maturity), which is largely driven by institutional money market funds. These short-term investments tend to expand when corporations and financial fiduciaries are nervous about investing longer-term, and therefore park more cash in money market funds for security.

The trouble with using MZM as an omen of inflation is that it has never worked.

MZM grew rapidly in 2001, during a recession, but MZM was nearly flat in 1973 when inflation began to explode. MZM fell from $854.3 billion in September 1978 to $827.3 billion in April 1980, yet this was a period of rapidly escalating inflation. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, reached 8.5% in the year ending December 1978, then 11.3% and 12.2% in the following years.

There may be an argument for raising the fed funds rate whenever oil and food prices rise, but MZM is not it.