"What Friedman’s simple forecasting method said is that you want to take the amount of money the economy is producing -- that really the government controls -- how much the money supply is growing. You want to subtract from that the amount by which economic production in the economy is growing, and the result is the inflation rate," explains Dr. Walden, a North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist.

"So, for example, right now the money supply in the country is growing around 5 percent, the economy is expected to increase its production by maybe between 2 and 3 percent. So the net result of subtraction there is you should get an inflation rate of about 2 to 3 percent.

"Now this is not a perfect predictor," Walden concludes. "It doesn’t have a perfect track record, but it does show through history to be a very good indicator."