# "Money Printer Go Brrr": What the Meme Gets Right (and Wrong) About M2 "Money printer go brrr" describes a central bank expanding its balance sheet, not a physical machine running hot. The figure the meme actually points at is broad money (M2). In the United States that stood at $30.68T as of 2025-12, up 6.0% year over year. Almost none of it came off a press. A commercial bank issues a loan, credits a deposit β€” and the deposit counts as new money the moment it posts. We check the joke against the number here: where it's right, where it's wrong, and the stretch it stopped tracking after 2022.
**Specs β€” U.S. money supply, as of 2025-12** | | | |---|---| | Level (broad money / M2) | $30.68T | | YoY growth | 6.0% | | 10-year CAGR | 6.6% | | Doubling time at that rate | 10.9 years | | Source | IMF MFS_MA/BM_MAI | | What actually creates it | Commercial-bank lending settled through reserves, not a printing press |
## Where the meme came from Its 2020 meme origin traces to one Reddit post, not a decade of finance content. u/Bitcoin_to_da_Moon posted ["Money printer go BRRR"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/fldh7y/money_printer_go_brrr/) to r/Bitcoin on 2020-03-19, four days after the March 2020 stimulus response β€” an emergency cut to zero rates and a $700B round of bond purchases, on 2020-03-15. It drew 222 upvotes and a comment thread that mostly reacts rather than explains: "Holy shit πŸ˜‚πŸ”₯", "You just broke the internet." One reply (30 upvotes) links to thefed.app; another warns "if you move the slider over too much you lose control of it" β€” the thread's own artifact is interactive, not a static image. The phrasing spread across r/Bitcoin and /r/wallstreetbets within the same week and has stayed in circulation since, remixed onto everything from Powell's face to a crying wojak, built on the same Fed money printer image. For the meme's fuller pop-culture timeline β€” every remix, every subreddit fork β€” KnowYourMeme has already written that history; we link out rather than repeat it. ## What actually happens when a central bank "prints money" No press runs when M2 rises. A commercial bank creates a loan and credits the borrower's deposit account. That deposit is new money the instant it posts β€” banks create most broad money through lending, and the central bank's own role is narrower. During the kind of quantitative easing meme the format usually illustrates, a central bank buys bonds from banks and credits their reserve accounts. Those reserves sit inside the banking system, not in anyone's wallet. Physical currency β€” banknotes and coin β€” is one small component inside the M2 total, not the whole of it. That's also why "how many banknotes does the Bureau of Engraving and Printing run each year" is a different question from "how fast did the money supply grow" β€” two topics that share a name. We treat them separately here. ## Is the meme accurate? Yes on direction, no on mechanism. We compute a 36.9% rise in U.S. broad money between December 2019 ($19.88T) and December 2021 ($27.23T, IMF MFS_MA/BM_MAI). What the meme gets wrong is the picture of a machine. That growth came from bank lending and Fed asset purchases crediting reserves, not from a printing press. The meme also stalled on its own story. Broad money fell 1.6%, to $26.78T by September 2022, as the Fed raised rates and ran quantitative tightening. A shrinking number doesn't fit a "go brrr" punchline, so the format simply stopped updating. It's not a hyperinflation joke either. Across the top replies we pulled from the original post, exactly one reaches for hyperinflation β€” "kind of a funny demonstration. needs some hyperinflation at some point showing the whole system collapse" (u/botaine, r/Bitcoin, 7 upvotes, 2020-03-20) β€” a different order of magnitude from a currency collapse. ## The "80% of all dollars were printed since 2020" myth The community debunked this one on its own turf: /r/wallstreetbets, 325 upvotes, [2022-05-16](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ur3amg/are_people_still_misinterpreting_the_m1_money/). u/the_buddhaverse traced the 80% figure to an M1 chart, not M2, and to a one-time definitional change the Fed had already documented. > "Recognizing savings deposits as a transaction account as of May 2020 will cause a series break in the M1 monetary aggregate. Beginning with the May 2020 observation, M1 will increase by the size of the industry total of savings deposits, which amounted to approximately $11.2 trillion." β€” Federal Reserve technical Q&A, quoted in u/the_buddhaverse's post That break is the whole story. M1 read $16.2T in May 2020, the first month on the new definition; back the $11.2T out and the series was running near $5T the month before. u/the_buddhaverse's own read: "This is not new money, but rather an accounting reclassification of $11.2 in existing savings deposits." Measure March 2022's $20.7T against that pre-break base and you get (20.7 βˆ’ 5) / 20.7 β‰ˆ 76%. That is the move behind "nearly 80% of all dollars": you pick a base from before the redefinition, and the accounting break counts as printing. Strip the break out instead and the real rise is $20.7T βˆ’ $16.2T = $4.5T β€” matching the roughly $4–4.5T in COVID-era federal borrowing and spending u/the_buddhaverse cites from USASpending.gov. Divide $4.5T by $20.7T and you get 21.7% β€” not "nearly 80%." The myth's chart conflates two things: a genuine expansion, and a one-time reclassification that made the line jump in a single month. It's an M1 artifact specifically β€” we track M2 (broad money) instead, because M2 carries no such discontinuity. ## What "brrr" means in slang "Brrr" is internet slang for something running at full, uncontrolled output. Wiktionary defines the broader term "go brrr" as "to go out of control; to increase or thrive despite opposition" β€” an onomatopoeia for a motor, borrowed from gun and car culture before finance picked it up in March 2020. Applied to a central bank, it means the balance sheet is expanding fast. It does not mean banknotes are being printed. ## The real numbers, by country U.S. broad money has grown at a 6.6% 10-year CAGR (2025-12) β€” unremarkable next to the countries where broad money genuinely compounds fastest. Zimbabwe is the fastest we measure at all: 338.2% a year, doubling in 0.47 years, but annualised over only the 47 months since its 2022 redenomination, so it can't sit in a ten-year column. Over a full ten years the leader is South Sudan, at 69.6% (2026-06), doubling in 1.31 years. Argentina runs 62.8% (1.42 years, 2026-01), TΓΌrkiye 36.4% (2.23 years, 2026-02). At the other end, Japan's 10-year CAGR is just 2.61% (26.87 years, 2026-02) and Dominica's is the slowest positive rate we measure, 1.07% (65.28 years, 2026-02). That's a 10-year average, though: Dominica's most recent 12 months alone show 10.3% growth, faster than the United States' own latest 6.0% year-over-year reading. A 10-year average and a single year answer different questions β€” name which one you're citing. We rank all 159 countries by growth rate and doubling time at [/posts/money-supply-growth-ranking/](/posts/money-supply-growth-ranking/). If you want to see which currencies come closest to the meme's caricature, they sit at the top of [/posts/money-printer-ranking/](/posts/money-printer-ranking/). ## FAQ ### Does the Fed literally print money? Not for the number the meme is about. The Fed does print physical currency, but that's a small, separate line item. Broad money (M2) β€” the $30.68T figure behind the meme β€” grows mainly through commercial-bank lending and Fed asset purchases crediting bank reserves, not through a press. ### What year did the "money printer go brrr" meme start? March 2020. The defining post went up on r/Bitcoin on 2020-03-19, the same week the Fed cut rates to zero and began a new round of bond purchases. ### Why do crypto communities say "money printer go brrr"? It's the fiat debasement argument in shorthand: if central-bank balance sheets grow faster than the assets you hold, those assets should be worth more in the diluted currency. "Bitcoin can act as a hedge against fiat currency debasement," as one r/Superstonk post put it. Whether the correlation actually holds is a separate, disputed question β€” the same instinct that produces "stonks only go up," pointed at a different chart. ### Is the money printer meme still accurate in 2026? Partly. It was right about direction for 2020-2021: U.S. broad money grew 36.9% in two years. It's been wrong since 2022: broad money fell for about nine months during quantitative tightening, then resumed growing at 6.0% a year (2025-12) β€” closer to its pre-2020 pace than to the runaway expansion the meme describes.