We don’t know for certain, but the evidence points that way.
Ideally, we’d have a highly liquid NGDP futures market. Unfortunately, we are still in the Stone Age of macroeconomics. (Future generations will laugh at our ineptness, just as we laugh at 1930s and 1970s policymakers.)
Without the NGDP future market, I usually start with 5-year TIPS spreads, which have been rising during 2022. They might be distorted by rising oil prices, so then I look at 5-year, 5-year forward TIPS spreads, which have also been rising. They are not affected by commodity prices. Check that, they might be affected (I’ve never studied the issue), but they are not distorted by commodity prices, which follow something close to a random walk.
If you put a gun to my head, and forced me to come up with an argument that money is getting tighter, despite all of this evidence, here’s what I’d say:
The stance of monetary policy is not a single number; it’s a vector. There’s the 12-month expected NGDP growth rate, the expected NGDP growth rate from 12 to 24 months out, the expected NGDP growth rate from 24 to 36 months out, etc., etc.
It’s theoretically possible that near-term expected NGDP growth is slowing, despite rising TIPS spreads, while longer run expected NGDP growth is rising. It’s possible that short run money is getting tighter while long run money is getting looser. In the near term, the Ukraine supply shock might have caused inflation expectations to rise even as NGDP growth expectations fell.
But I like Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation for what’s going on is that the Fed is gradually losing credibility, which means money is getting easier. That’s my current view.
PS. If you want a concrete example of a monetary policy change that would make money tighter in the short run and easier in the long run, consider what would happen if Japan pegged the yen to the dollar. Japanese interest rates would immediately rise to US levels, but inflation in Japan would move closer to US levels in the very long run.