In his 2012 speech at the Western Economic Association International, John C Williams, then the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and since the president and CEO of the all-powerful New York Fed quoted Milton Friedman’s famous dictum that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” Williams went on to state that the Fed was “currently engaged in a test of this proposition. Over the past four years, the Federal…