M2 vs Gold: What the Ratio Actually Shows Since Nixon

Fifty-five years ago today, on 1971-08-15, the Nixon shock ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold — the reason every gold/M2 chart we found starts near 1970. Gold trades at $4,373.00/oz — the LBMA PM fix for 2026-08-13, via macromicro — about 19% below the $5,400 a 4,594-upvote r/Gold thread called “getting scary” on 2026-01-28, while our own US M2 has grown 38.36x since 1971, a 6.99%/yr average over 54 years. We hold no gold price series ourselves. Correlation is not causation — stated before the first figure.

Correlation, not causation — the same rule as our Bitcoin page

We built this page on the same template as our M2-vs-Bitcoin page — same complaint, same fix. A 34-upvote reply to the Bitcoin thread named it directly: the chart is “comparing a linear progression to a logarithmic one, so it’s tailor made to fit a preconcieved [sic] trend” (u/nicsenespomnem, r/Bitcoin, 2025-05-13). A second reply, 10 upvotes, called it “data ‘manipulated’ to fit a narative [sic]” (u/Embarrassed-Bowl-230, r/Bitcoin, 2025-05-13). Neither names gold, but the same two-axis choice applies before any gold figure below.

The published method: what an m2 vs gold chart is actually plotting

Search m2 vs gold chart and the same pages answer every time: ingoldwetrust.report, vaulted.com, macromicro, goldsilver.com, voronoiapp. Most index gold price and US M2 to 100 since 1970 and run to the present (checked 2026-08). That’s more defensible than the Bitcoin chart: gold moved from $35/oz under Bretton Woods to $4,373.00/oz now (LBMA PM, 2026-08-13) — about 125x — against M2’s 38.36x since 1971, close enough in magnitude that most gold charts stay linear where every Bitcoin/M2 chart needs a log scale. Switch gold to log anyway and the two-decade 1980-1999 divergence below compresses visually — the stretch this page treats as the honest test, not a footnote.

Lead or lag: gold’s own reproducibility question

No fixed lead or lag for gold against M2 turns up in our SERP or community pool — unlike Bitcoin, where a reader asked “can anyone explain how the 3 month lead is calculated? Is it estimated?” (2 upvotes, u/manugd, r/Bitcoin, 2025-05-13) and got no answer. The closest our pool comes is a YouTube explainer promising “the 78-day vs 108-day offset” — whose gold line carries no offset at all: gold “mirrors Global M2” while leading Bitcoin, not M2 (SERP description, checked 2026-08). Fitting an offset between two rising lines until one appears to lead the other by some tidy number of months runs the same unpublished lag-selection process. CF Benchmarks’ own regression, behind every gold figure below, skips a fixed lead: same-period beta and R² each quarter, no lag term (2026-03-19). We treat a gold lead/lag claim like Bitcoin’s — unreproducible until published.

Since Nixon: what our own M2 series can actually show

Our US series covers 1971 — $799.9B, World Bank annual backfill (the IMF series itself begins 2001-12). By 1980 — In Gold We Trust’s ratio chart records its low near 2, gold expensive relative to money — M2 had grown to $1.986T, 2.48x 1971. By 1999 — as that ratio climbed toward its “close to 20” early-2000s high, gold turned cheap relative to money — M2 reached $6.496T: 8.12x 1971, 3.27x 1980 alone. The World Bank backfill ends at 2000 ($7.02T); IMF quarterly data picks up at 2001-12 ($7.58T) — a source change, not a level break, so the multiples spanning it still hold. By 2025-12, US M2 stands at $30.68T: 38.36x 1971, 6.99%/yr over 54 years. That’s our half; the gold half lives at In Gold We Trust and its own sources.

The divergence periods: 1980-1999, the honest test of the thesis

Every incumbent gold/M2 ratio chart we found glosses over this stretch; academic work does not — Synek (2024) runs an Engle-Granger cointegration test on the same span, on econstor.eu. In Gold We Trust’s ratio chart, sourced from the Fed and Incrementum AG, describes two highs since 1968 — “around 17” in the early 1970s, “close to 20” in the early 2000s — and a low “almost” 2 in 1980 (checked 2026-08): high ratio, gold cheap relative to M2; low ratio, gold expensive. Against our own figures: gold went from expensive (1980) to cheap (early 2000s) while M2 nearly tripled (3.27x) in between. Money supply kept climbing through the 1980s and 1990s; gold’s dollar price, by the ratio’s shape, did the opposite. That’s the divergence, and it ran for about two decades.

What would gold be worth at the 1980 ratio — arithmetic, not a forecast

The ratio is M2 in billions over the gold price per ounce, which is what makes this arithmetic reproducible. If it returned to its 1980 low of roughly 2, take the Fed’s own headline M2 — $23.16T for June 2026, FRED M2SL, the series the ratio’s creators use. That is 23,155 billion; divided by 2, about $11,578/oz. Our own wider figure, $30.68T (2025-12, IMF-harmonised since 2001), is 30,680 billion: about $15,340/oz on the same ratio. The $3,762/oz gap isn’t a gold question at all: part is the same US-M2-definition gap from our Bitcoin page; the rest is six months of vintage, June 2026 against December 2025. Neither number is a prediction; both assume a 46-year-old ratio extreme repeats exactly, which it may never do.

Gold vs Bitcoin as competing debasement hedges

Both claim the same job, a monetary debasement hedge, compared here on one dataset. CF Benchmarks’ rolling regression (published 2026-03-19) puts gold’s beta to global M2 near 1.3, R² holding at 0.72-0.80 since late 2023 — a stable fit. Bitcoin’s beta runs far hotter, near 11.3, but its R² has collapsed to about 0.59. During the COVID shock, both rose together — gold 11.5%, Bitcoin 8.5%, in six months of M2 growth; in the 2022 tightening they split, gold eked out 1.8%, Bitcoin fell 52.4%. In the most recent break, they inverted — gold up roughly 89% since early 2025 to above $5,000/oz as of CF Benchmarks’ 2026-02-01 cutoff, against a shrinking Bitcoin. Gold’s Z-score against its M2-implied fair value climbed from 1.38 (early 2025) to 2.82 (2026-02-01); Bitcoin’s fell from +1.48 to -1.31. One overshot its model; the other undershot it — same M2 series.

What the r/Gold thread said in January

r/Gold’s 4,594-upvote post of 2026-01-28, titled “This is getting scary.”, carried the $5,400 print: “Gold just jumped another $300 in a single day and is sitting at $5,400” (u/Leading_Contact3750). One reply, 324 upvotes, drew the line we opened with: “Last time we had this kind of price action in gold was just after Nixon ‘temporarily’ suspended the dollar’s convertibility to gold” (u/Chucking100s, r/Gold, 2026-01-28). Another, 97 upvotes, claimed gold is “on its way above $10,000” under Basel III bank rules (u/Vegas_paid_off, r/Gold, 2026-01-28) — unverifiable, quoted only as what the thread said.

Is there a site that tracks this consistently?

The same reader question applies here: “is there a website where this correlation is consistently updated?” (12 upvotes, u/Broad-Assistance-437, r/Bitcoin, 2025-05-13). Half we promise: our figures update on the schedule in the Specs box above, logged below each time they move. The other half isn’t ours: the live spot comes from macromicro, the ratio from In Gold We Trust, on their schedule, not ours.

Real gold price, ounces per dollar, and what we track vs. what we don’t

Two more framings recur around the m2 vs gold chart: the real gold price (inflation-adjusted, not M2-adjusted) and ounces of gold per M2 dollar, the ratio flipped — both gold-side, uncovered here. Our contribution stops at the M2 half: for the dollar’s debasement rate, see currency debasement; for money growth and prices, see money supply vs inflation. Method: our methodology page.

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