Of many dubious claims that recent Federal Reserve Board nominee Stephen Moore made in a Wall Street Journal op-ed he published a couple weeks ago, perhaps the most startling was his claim that "to break the crippling inflation of the 1970s," former Fed chair Paul Volcker linked Fed monetary policy to real-time changes in commodity prices. "When commodity prices rose," Moore wrote, "Mr. Volcker saw inflation coming and increased interest rates. When commodities fell in price, he lowered rates."
Of course it's true that, in the early 1980s (not the late 1970s), Paul