In the third quarter of the year, the economy grew by 8.5 percent in nominal terms — that is, measured in dollars with no adjustment for inflation. When the number came out last week, I thought it looked much too high. It’s higher than it was in any quarter during the economic expansion of the 2010s, for example.

David Beckworth, at the Mercatus Center, has been tracking a number he called the “NGDP gap” — the gap, that is, between the current-dollar size of the economy and what it had previously been expected to be. A positive gap suggests that money is too loose, and a negative one that it is too tight.

A certain amount of drift is built into that measurement: If money has been loose for a while, then expectations for the dollar size of the economy increase. But even given that we have had loose money for several years now, Beckworth’s gap rose again.

Since the pandemic ended, we have seen the gap decline for only one quarter, earlier this year. If this indicator is telling us something accurate about the economy, it means that we are continuing in a persistently loose monetary environment and we are going to see continued high inflation or interest-rate hikes more painful than we have yet experienced, or both in succession.