MONEY SUPPLY GROWTH RANKING

Money Supply Growth Rate by Country, Ranked

Zimbabwe’s money supply is growing 338.2% a year (2026-04) — the fastest rate in the 159-economy table below, and one measured over 47 months rather than ten years, because a 2022-05 redenomination breaks its series. South Sudan leads on a full decade at 69.6%/yr (2026-06), doubling every 1.31 years. Dominica is slowest at 1.07%/yr (2026-02).

Read the Window column before you read the rank. Most rows are a true ten-year CAGR. Six carry a break in the IMF series, a redenomination, where the currency was reissued at a new unit. For two of those the break sits inside the ten-year window, so we measure from the break forward instead: Zimbabwe over 47 months, Equatorial Guinea over 67. Those rows carry a †. A 47-month rate and a ten-year rate are not the same measurement, and we do not treat them as comparable. Zimbabwe holds the top row on the number; South Sudan holds it on the ten-year metric everything else here uses.

The fastest, with doubling time

Zimbabwe holds the fastest growing money supply in our dataset at 338.2%/yr (2026-04), annualised over the 47 months since its redenomination — a pace that halves each existing unit’s claim on real goods roughly every 0.47 years. South Sudan is the fastest over a full decade at 69.6%/yr (2026-06), and Argentina, Sudan, Venezuela and Türkiye follow it above 35%/yr across the same ten years.

† measured from a series break, not over ten years — see the Window column. ⚠ observation older than 24 months: the average is historically accurate, not this month’s rate. Columns 3-5 describe the window in column 4; column 6 is YoY growth, the last 12 months alone.

All 159 economies, ranked

The twelve rows above are an excerpt of the table below. We keep both because the excerpt carries two columns the generated table does not: doubling time and latest YoY. The numbers are otherwise identical, drawn from the same index. The full list runs to 159 rows — the 157 economies with a positive growth rate, then the two shrinking ones at the foot, where doubling time turns undefined. Read it as a money supply index sorted by rate rather than by size. Search it by country name; nothing here is truncated to a top 10.

Why this ranking skips the FX step entirely

We compute CAGR and doubling time before any currency conversion. A percentage change needs no dollar figure. That makes this the only ranking on the site with no FX-timing gap: a currency that moves 20% against the dollar inside one year still produces an exact growth rate, because nothing here touches an exchange rate.

It’s also why 4 of the 185 economies we track can rank here despite carrying no USD-converted value at all. Anguilla, Montserrat, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union and the West African Economic and Monetary Union have no World Bank FX rate indexed to them. Our level rankings exclude all four. Two of them, Anguilla and Montserrat, appear in the slow-end table below instead. Their absence from a level ranking is a real gap. Their presence here isn’t a workaround — it’s the dimensionless metric working as designed.

We exclude the 20 euro-area member states here for a different reason: none of them has an independent money supply left to grow or shrink. Every euro-area growth figure is the Euro Area’s own 4.71%/yr, whichever member’s flag sits on the query. The full explanation covers the redirect mechanism.

Three economies that use the euro without being euro-area members do rank, and that distinction is worth stating before anyone spots it. Kosovo is 61st at 10.35%/yr (2025-06), Montenegro 86th at 8.70%/yr (2026-01), and San Marino sits in the shrinking table below at −0.76%/yr (2026-01). Each reports its own broad money to the IMF — 283, 167 and 290 observations respectively — because deposits in Kosovar, Montenegrin and Sammarinese banks fall outside the ECB’s M3. Their rates are their own and look nothing like the Euro Area’s 4.71%. Germany has no such series at all. That is the whole difference between a euro user and a euro-area member.

The other tail: shrinking money supplies and the slow end

Two economies show a negative 10-year CAGR — a shrinking money supply, not merely a slow-growing one. Doubling time is undefined for a negative rate, so they sit at the foot of the full table with an empty doubling column, outside the 157 ranked rows.

Both show a positive latest year-over-year reading despite the negative decade-long CAGR. The two figures describe different windows. A positive recent month is compatible with a net decline measured over ten years.

Equatorial Guinea used to be the third row here at −3.86%/yr, and it no longer belongs. That figure measured across a redenomination: the series drops from 81.77 trillion to 537 billion between 2018-04 and 2018-05, and the ten-year window we were using swallowed the unit change. Measured from the break forward, over 67 months, it grows 12.5%/yr (2023-12) and ranks 37th. Its money supply was never shrinking; our window was wrong.

Below the shrinking pair, the slowest-growing positive economies cluster around hard pegs and small island monetary unions:

‡ no USD-converted value — valid here, since a growth rate ranking needs no FX rate at all.

That’s a preview, not the full inverse ranking. The complete slow-end table, plus the honest caveat about what a low growth rate does and doesn’t tell you, lives on Least Money Printing Countries — a page the r/Infographics community asked for directly (“We need a Least Money Printer Economies,” 4 upvotes). We don’t repeat that analysis here; we point at it.

What a fast growing money supply does not mean

A high CAGR is not inflation. Money-supply growth is a stock measure: the total currency and deposits in circulation. CPI inflation is a price index built from a separate basket of goods. The two correlate over long stretches, most visibly at South Sudan’s end of this table. But they come from different data and can diverge sharply within any single year.

Growth is not wealth, either. It’s monetary dilution, or purchasing-power decay in the more literal phrase: a growing money supply dilutes each existing unit’s claim on real goods. It doesn’t manufacture real output. The audience’s own word for that dilution is “debasement rate” — three names for the same CAGR column here, under different vocabulary. Currency debasement covers the full measurement.

Nor is a high CAGR a collapse forecast. Zimbabwe has run the fastest rate in this table since its 2022-05 redenomination without repeating its 2008 collapse. Japan’s 2.61%/yr doesn’t make the yen “safe” in any absolute sense, only slow-moving. A growth rate describes the window it was measured over, not the next one.

Every figure here is also nominal, not inflation-adjusted — the real vs nominal money growth distinction, stated plainly. A country running 40% money-supply growth against 35% CPI inflation dilutes real balances by a far smaller margin than the headline CAGR implies. Reading that gap needs both numbers, not one.

How we calculate CAGR and doubling time

CAGR, the compound annual growth rate, is (latest value ÷ value at the start of the window)^(1/years) − 1, in each country’s own currency. The window is ten years wherever the series allows it. We never convert to USD first, so the FX limitation on methodology never touches this column.

Where a series carries a redenomination inside that ten-year window, we measure from the break forward instead, and the Window column says so. Zimbabwe’s series falls from 671.4 billion (2022-04) to 388.8 million (2022-05), a factor of 1,727 — a currency reissued, not money destroyed. A ten-year CAGR spanning that point measures the unit change and nothing else. Six series carry a break: Zimbabwe (2022-05) and Equatorial Guinea (2018-05) are measured over the shortened window, Sierra Leone (2015-01) and Guinea-Bissau (2003-12) break before the window opens and keep a full ten years, and Grenada (2025-01) and Gambia (2025-10) are left too short to annualise at all, so they carry no growth figure and appear nowhere in the ranking.

Doubling time comes from ln(2) ÷ ln(1 + CAGR), not the mental-math rule of 72 (72 divided by the growth rate). The two agree closely at low growth rates: Dominica’s 1.07%/yr gives 65.28 years exact against 67.45 years by the rule of 72, a 3% gap. They diverge hard at high growth rates: South Sudan’s 69.6%/yr gives 1.31 years exact against 1.04 years by the rule of 72, a 21% underestimate. We use the exact formula on every row.

The base year is ten years before the latest observation, not a fixed calendar year, except on the break-shortened rows above. Türkiye’s CAGR compares 2026-02 against roughly 2016-02. Canada’s compares 2008 against roughly 1999, because 2008 is the newest figure we have for Canada. Full methodology covers how every row is sourced.

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