What Is M3 Money Supply?

M3 money supply adds large time deposits, institutional money-market funds and repurchase agreements on top of M2. The Federal Reserve stopped publishing it on March 23, 2006. The euro area’s headline aggregate is M3 instead — our own series, ECB BSI M3, monthly since 1980: €17.61T ($19.90T converted) as of 2026-06.

What M3 money supply adds to M2

M3 is M2 broad money plus three layers: large time deposits above M2’s threshold, institutional money-market funds, and repurchase agreements. A repo is a short-term loan between banks, backed by collateral. None of it is money a household holds directly.

M3 sits at the wholesale end of the liquidity ladder. It’s several rungs above the M0 monetary base and M1 narrow money — the layers most people actually spend. The M0-M4 ladder in full lays out every rung; every term on it is defined at our money supply glossary.

M3 is the fourth rung. In the United States that ordering is mostly historical: the Fed no longer tracks it. In the euro area, M3 is the headline aggregate, not a discontinued extra layer.

Why the US stopped publishing M3 money supply in 2006

The Federal Reserve discontinued M3 on March 23, 2006. Its stated reason: M3 didn’t convey information about economic activity that M2 didn’t already capture. The data behind it was large time deposits, big money-market balances, repurchase agreements, and Eurodollars US residents held abroad. Collecting all of it had grown expensive relative to what it added. That’s a data-availability decision, not a data blackout. The Fed still collects most of the underlying components elsewhere in its statistical releases; it stopped assembling them into one published M3 total.

That 2006 stop is why a reader checking FRED for a US M3 finds M2 instead — and a number well below ours. We hold $30.68 trillion for the United States (2025-12, IMF harmonised broad money, quarterly). FRED’s own M2 reads $23.16 trillion for the same country (M2SL, June 2026) — a gap of about $7.5 trillion. The IMF’s series counts more instrument types than the Fed’s post-2020 M2.

It’s tempting to call our number “the old M3, still running.” We checked, and that doesn’t hold up. FRED itself carries an OECD series titled “Broad Money and Components: M3 for United States” (MABMM301USM189S). It stops at November 2023. Its final reading is $20.77 trillion, against our own $27.48 trillion the month after. The series with “M3” in its name tracks the Fed’s M2, not ours: M2SL read $20.75 trillion that same month. The gap is real and it is definitional — the exact instrument-by-instrument match-up is a piece we can’t source yet.

The gap got read as something darker in parts of this audience — a hidden number nobody’s allowed to see anymore. What’s actually missing is a single line the Fed used to draw for you. John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics rebuilds an unofficial M3 estimate from the pieces the Fed still publishes elsewhere. We don’t reconstruct it ourselves. Our own dataset tracks broad money instead — the IMF’s harmonised series — for every economy we cover, the euro area’s real M3 included.

The euro area’s M3 money supply: our own series

Where the US discontinued M3, the ECB made it the headline. Our Euro Area figure comes directly from ECB BSI M3 — full detail in the Specs box above. Converted to dollars at the same World Bank rate used across this site, that’s $19.90T.

It sits below the United States’ $30.68T (2025-12, our own figure) and above the United Kingdom’s $5.24T (2024, World Bank annual). Three series, three update speeds: monthly here, quarterly for the US, annual for the UK. The UK’s annual reading is the World Bank’s, not the Bank of England’s own monthly M4.

None of the euro area’s 20 member states carries its own M3 figure. Germany doesn’t issue euros separately from France, so every member points at this same series rather than a national one. Full sourcing for the ECB mirror, and every other series on this site, lives at methodology. The country-by-country rule is covered at broad money and on the euro area’s own page.

Is broad money the same as M3 money supply?

Only where M3 happens to be the headline aggregate — the euro area and Japan among them. The IMF doesn’t publish a global “M3.” It publishes broad money instead: one shared rule (MFS_MA/BM_MAI). It’s built country by country. Each reading matches whatever that country’s own broadest aggregate contains.

For the United States, that’s M2. For the euro area and Japan, it’s M3. For the United Kingdom, it’s M4. “Broad money” is the name that works everywhere. “M3” only fits where M3 is the widest thing a central bank still tracks. We define the umbrella term at broad money and lay out the full ladder at monetary aggregates.

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