What Is Broad Money?

The short broad money definition: cash, plus every bank deposit short of large institutional holdings. It’s the widest tier of money a country reports. The IMF names it; national labels differ — M2 in the United States, M3 in the euro area, M4 in the United Kingdom. We sum it across 159 of 185 economies: $144.41T, through 2026-06. The observation dates are mixed, and one harmonised series is the only way to rank all 159 against each other.

What broad money includes

Broad money is a rule, not a fixed list. Whatever a country’s own broadest published aggregate contains, the IMF asks the central bank to report it. That figure gets republished under one shared label. In practice that means currency in circulation, checking and savings deposits, time deposits and money market securities — money supply’s usual components. Cash sits at the narrow end. Near-money instruments sit at the far end of the liquidity spectrum. M1 sits in between, sometimes called narrow money. Broad money is everything M1 has, plus more. It stops short of institutional-only holdings, government securities, equities and real estate. Two countries’ broad-money totals can differ in exactly which deposit types sit inside the line. Each one is built from that country’s own headline aggregate, not a single global checklist.

Why the IMF publishes broad money instead of a global M2

National labels don’t line up. The United States calls its headline aggregate M2; our own US row is the IMF’s harmonised broad money, $30.68T (2025-12), up 6.0% year over year. The euro area calls its own M3 — €17.61T, or $19.90T converted (2026-06), up 4.0% year over year. The OECD republishes that same euro-area reading as “OECD broad money (M3).” The United Kingdom’s headline is Bank of England M4 — $5.24T (2024, World Bank annual). The Bank of Canada tracks a further-extended M2++. Our own read of Canada, from the Bank of Canada’s Valet API (2026-05), is $3.77T. Japan’s headline aggregate, redefined by the Bank of Japan in 2008, is M3 — $10.89T (2026-02). China’s headline is M2 — $42.64T (2024), already the largest single reading in our dataset.

Five labels, one concept. A reader comparing “US M2” to “UK M4” by name alone can’t tell whether the two numbers measure the same thing. They don’t, component-wise. A bare label doesn’t say so. The IMF’s MFS_MA/BM_MAI series and the World Bank’s FM.LBL.BMNY.CN mirror strip the label away. What is left is the comparable number.

The United States row is where label and concept come apart widest, and it is the one gap a reader can check in a browser in about a minute. Our $30.68T (2025-12) is the IMF’s harmonised broad money for the US. The Federal Reserve’s own M2 reads $23.16T (2026-06) on FRED, series M2SL. The ~$7.5T between them is definitional, not an error: the harmonised series covers instruments the Fed’s post-2020 M2 leaves out. It is not the Fed’s retired M3 wearing a different name, either — the one FRED series still labelled “M3 for the United States” (OECD, MABMM301USM189S) read $20.77T in November 2023, tracking the Fed’s own M2 rather than our $27.48T that December. So we never call our US number M2. We call it broad money, like the other five rows — the only name that means the same thing in all of them. The full country-by-country mapping, letter by letter, lives at broad money across countries.

What broad money buys you that a national label can’t

Comparability. 159 economies, no shared component list, ranked on one metric. A reader asking whether China or the United States “prints more” is really comparing two differently-bundled aggregates. They happen to share a name: M2. Broad money is what makes that comparison honest: it matches definitions, not labels.

The comparison isn’t free of gaps, and we publish them rather than hide them. Twenty of the 185 economies — every euro-area member — carry no figure of their own. They’re folded into the Euro Area total above, because Germany doesn’t issue euros separately from France. Four more — Anguilla, Montserrat, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, the West African Economic and Monetary Union — have their own IMF series. None has a World Bank exchange rate. They’re absent from every dollar total, ours included. Somalia has a series too, but it converts to a figure four orders of magnitude below its neighbours. It’s a dollarised economy with a residual national-currency series, not a data error. We keep it out of dollar rankings for that reason. One more row is a duplicate rather than a gap: the IMF publishes its own euro-area aggregate (G163) next to the ECB’s, and summing both would add a second euro area worth $18.97T (2025-05) on top of the $19.90T already counted, so we drop it — logged in corrections. Twenty, plus four, plus Somalia, plus that duplicate is how 185 becomes 159. All four exclusions are detailed at methodology.

Why broad money matters

A 2019 r/dataisbeautiful thread on a money-supply-versus-GDP chart drew this reply: “Yes, I liked the data presentation, but I don’t know the significance of broad money.” (u/tobalaba, 6 upvotes, 2019-12-19). The significance is comparability. Growth in broad money is what every YoY figure, 10-year CAGR and doubling-time estimate on this site is computed from. South Sudan’s broad money doubles every 1.3 years, at its 10-year average rate. The United States’ doubles every 10.9 years, at its own. Both numbers come off the same harmonised series — not off two countries’ differently-defined “M2s.” That comparability is why a cross-country money-printing ranking can exist at all.

How broad money is calculated, and where the gaps are

Central banks report deposit and currency balances directly. There’s no formula, no estimate. The IMF collects each country’s own headline aggregate through the IMF Monetary and Financial Statistics framework. It republishes that as one harmonised series: MFS_MA/BM_MAI, for 155 of the 185 economies we track. Two economies report through a separate IMF table instead, the Depository Corporations Survey (MFS_DC/DCORP_L_BM). Seven more — including China, the UK and Canada — come through the World Bank’s own annual mirror, FM.LBL.BMNY.CN. The IMF table doesn’t carry them at the frequency we need. The World Bank FM.LBL.BMNY.GD.ZS indicator publishes a GDP-scaled cut of the same reports — a ratio, not the level figures we use. The euro area’s 20 members plus the union itself run through the ECB’s BSI M3 release instead of either.

We convert every non-USD reading ourselves, at the World Bank’s period-average annual exchange rate (PA.NUS.FCRF). Each rate is matched to the year of its observation — an annual average applied to a monthly or quarterly reading. That’s a real approximation, stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Where no exchange rate exists for an economy, the growth figures still work. YoY, CAGR and doubling time are dimensionless. Only the dollar level is missing.

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