The salience of money for the European Central Bank, economists and the general public 

In the view of economists, money seems to have lost its relevance for forecasting, let alone explaining, inflation. In the European Central Bank’s 2021 monetary policy strategy review (see ECB, 2021), there is indeed a reference to “a weakening of the empirical link between monetary aggregates and inflation”. And the economic and the monetary pillars of the ECB strategy have disappeared, transformed into an “integrated analytical framework that brings together two analyses: the economic analysis and the monetary and financial analysis”. Only as a sort of afterthought is it said that: “The integrated analytical framework will continue to consider the information from monetary and credit aggregates”1.

However, a Google search for the word ‘money’ and its cousins (monetary aggregates, M1, M2, M3) for the euro area and the United States is not consistent with this irrelevance hypothesis. The frequency of the word ‘money’, in particular in its narrower definition of M1, has increased quite abruptly since the end of 2019 (Figure 1). In Figure 1 and subsequent figures, the shaded area starting in March 2020 highlights the ‘pandemic observations’.