“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 — 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.

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” to r/Bitcoin on 2020-03-19, four days after the March 2020 stimulus response — 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 😂🔥”, “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” — 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 — every remix, every subreddit fork — 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 — 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 — banknotes and coin — 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” — 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 — “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) — 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. 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.” — 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 − 5) / 20.7 ≈ 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 − $16.2T = $4.5T — 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% — 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 — 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” — 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) — 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), Türkiye 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 — name which one you’re citing.

We rank all 159 countries by growth rate and doubling time at /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/.

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