The Federal Reserve recently discontinued updating the M1 and M2 weekly money supply series and is instead updating the series monthly.

Steve Hanke, professor of Applied Economics of Johns Hopkins University, said that this change reflects a change in attitude from the world's largest central bank on the importance of looking at money supply.

"Chairman Powell has very explicitly claimed that money doesn't matter in recent testimony. He's basically said that money and the measurement of money doesn't really matter because it's unrelated to inflation," Hanke said.

These money supply series have been published since the 1970s, and the fact that the Fed has changed the publishing frequency on M1 and M2 money supply from weekly to monthly demonstrates a change in worldviews, Hanke said.

"In principle, they don't think [this data] is important. They want to deep-six the monetarists, basically and push them off to the sidelines. They want to bury Milton Friedman once and for all and be done with it, and their preference would probably to not report any monetary statistics," he said.

The succession of government stimulus packages to combat the covid-19 pandemic has increased the broad supply of money in the United States from $15.5 trillion in February 2020 to a whopping $19.4 trillion in January. That is a record one-year increase, according to statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Biden’s billions will come on top of that.

This has not caused inflation so far because people have largely saved the money rather than spent it. The personal savings rate — the percentage of income that people save rather than spend — has skyrocketed during the pandemic, up from a pre-pandemic average of around 7 percent to as high as 34 percent last April. The savings rates for almost every month over the past year have exceeded that of virtually every month in the past 60 years, as people socked away their wages and the government’s previous stimulus checks. That means most Americans will already be sitting on oodles of cash when Biden’s new $1,400-per-adult checks hit their bank accounts.

What Americans decide to do with this money will determine whether we experience a burst of inflation in the coming months.