"Inflation? What inflation?" wrote Zacks analyst Dirk van Dijk on the financial company's blog earlier this year.

"Strippers declare inflation dead" was the Bloomberg headline from a few weeks ago. (Strippers are a kind of Treasury bond. Don't get excited.)

The St. Louis Federal Reserve asks Web readers to choose "the top risk for reigniting inflation." The most popular answer: "There is no inflation risk — it's dead and buried."

So why are T. Rowe Price and other mutual fund companies increasingly trying to protect long-term investors against the risk that consumer-price increases will revive?

The firms stress that they're not necessarily worried about inflation in the next few years. Even so, the changes show that some smart people believe the inflationary graveyard won't remain peaceful forever. Investors and consumers, take note.

Baltimore-based Price has asked regulators for permission to add inflation-linked investments to its dated retirement funds, which aim for the best long-term mix of risk and returns based on when you plan to stop working. The application is pending.

Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, JPMorgan Chase and ING Group have made similar moves with their dated retirement funds, says Josh Charlson, senior fund analyst for Morningstar Inc.

"It's not pervasive yet, but definitely we've seen more of it," he says of the shift. "It seems to be coming from a combination of revised capital-market assumptions and economic forecasts that are predicting greater inflation."

PIMCO has introduced what Charlson calls "an extreme version" of what other firms are offering, a fund for young workers in which as much as 35 percent of the investments are designed to take off along with consumer prices, if and when that happens.

It certainly doesn't look as if that change will come in 2010. Consumer prices fell in April for the first time in more than a year. So far this year, inflation is on pace to rise less than 1 percent.

Inflation worrywarts such as Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, look at the Fed's breathtaking money creation under chairman Ben Bernanke and see all that cash bleeding into consumer prices. Soon.

A fat money supply, however, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for higher prices. Inflation requires several other boosters before it can take off, none of which are even on the launching pad.

Inflation needs a tight pool of workers so employers must bid up wages to obtain good talent. It needs solvent consumers and liberal lending to boost demand for consumer products. It needs maxed-out factories investing in expansions and passing the cost on to customers.

It needs large, "baby-boom" generations entering the work force and feathering newly bought houses, not winding down their careers and padding their savings accounts. It needs consumers expecting inflation.

None of those factors is anywhere close to being in place. And the global competition that heralded the death of inflation two decades ago hasn't disappeared. So maybe it's no surprise that about the only rising prices these days in the United States are for medicine and used cars.

Washington is selling 30-year bonds paying interest of about 4.2 percent, which is very low by historical standards. That suggests investors believe inflation will be substantially less than that until 2040 or so — an extremely long time.

And yet …

"We want to emphasize that we don't have expectations for high inflation," even for the longer term, says Jerome Clark, portfolio manager for Price's retirement funds. But the firm does expect "higher" inflation after the "low-to-moderate" price increases it projects for the next few years.

Partly for that reason, Price has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve the addition of modest amounts of real estate, commodities, metals and Treasury inflation bonds to its dated-retirement funds. If inflation does return in a significant way, those kinds of assets promise to appreciate while others (especially 30-year Treasury bonds!) get killed.

As Clark points out, it makes sense to add such investments to long-term, mixed funds no matter what your inflation expectations are. Until it gets the SEC's OK, the firm won't say exactly how much inflation-linked assets it would put into which funds, but the proportions won't be anywhere close to what PIMCO is offering. Even so, a 5 percent dollop of inflation bonds and another few percentage points of commodities and real estate, for example, could add diversification while reducing volatility.

And if inflation kicks in, so much the safer.

Here's the pro-inflation argument. Prices are rising across Asia, which could eventually be transmitted to U.S. consumer goods. Asian workers are demanding better pay and working conditions, which will add to upward pressure on prices. Washington is pushing China to allow its currency to increase, which would have the same effect. The American economy will not remain in a slump until 2040, no matter how pessimistic you are. And then there's that enormous money supply.

For the time being, those factors won't overcome the anti-inflationary forces represented by nearly 10 percent U.S. unemployment. But inflation is not dead the way Elvis is. The mutual funds aren't betting on it, and neither should you.