US Money Supply: $30.68T, and Why the Fed Says $23T

Yes — the United States’ broad money supply (cash, bank deposits and near-money the Fed calls M2) grew 6.0% in the year to December 2025, reaching $30.68 trillion. That’s our own IMF-harmonised read. The Federal Reserve’s own broad measure of money, M2, reads $23.16 trillion (FRED M2SL, June 2026) — a narrower, different series, not a rival number.

That $7.53 trillion gap is definitional, not an error. It is also the distance between two prints six months apart, so the same-date gap is wider still. Our figure is the IMF’s harmonised broad-money aggregate, and it counts a wider set of deposit and near-money instruments than the Fed’s post-2020 M2. That is the whole of the explanation we can stand behind. We have not established the instrument-by-instrument reconciliation between the two definitions, and we are not going to imply we have.

One tempting explanation we tested and dropped: that our series is really the old M3, the aggregate the Fed stopped publishing in 2006. It doesn’t survive a check. FRED carries the OECD’s own US M3 series — MABMM301USM189S, “Broad Money and Components: M3 for United States” — and it read $20.77 trillion in November 2023. Ours read $27.48 trillion in December 2023. The number publicly labelled US M3 sits close to the Fed’s M2, not to us. So a reader who checks FRED and finds a smaller number isn’t looking at a mistake. They are looking at a narrower ruler, and we cannot yet tell them exactly how much narrower. The full country-by-country mapping of what each aggregate actually includes is at comparing money supply across countries.

Is the US increasing its money supply?

Yes, on every measure we hold. US broad money grew 6.0% in the year to December 2025 and 6.6% a year on average over the prior decade (IMF MFS_MA/BM_MAI). At that decade-average pace, the total doubles every 10.9 years.

Our $30.68T isn’t the Fed’s own M2. FRED’s M2SL — currency, checking and savings deposits, small time deposits and retail money market funds, reported seasonally adjusted in the Fed’s monthly H.6 money stock measures release — read $23.16 trillion in June 2026, a year-over-year 5.53% pace per MacroMicro’s own tracking of that series (checked 2026-08). Both numbers move in the same direction; they disagree on the level because they cover different ground. The IMF harmonised measure folds in a wider set of near-money instruments than the Fed’s post-2020 M2 definition. The two series answer a similar question with a different ruler — not a contradictory one.

Has M2 recovered from the 2022-23 contraction?

Yes — and the recovery finished in a single quarter, not gradually over years. US broad money peaked at $27.23 trillion in December 2021, then contracted for three straight quarters, bottoming at $26.78 trillion in September 2022 — a 1.63% drawdown. By March 2023 it had cleared a new high, $27.25 trillion.

The contraction and the recovery are both real, computed directly from our own quarterly series, and both cut against a tidy narrative. This post-pandemic contraction broke the “money printer never stops” story on one side — the money supply genuinely shrank for three straight quarters. It also complicates a pure stagnation story on the other: the recovery to a new high took about five quarters, not years.

It wasn’t the deepest drawdown in our series either. That was 2010, at 4.89% over two quarters — three times the size of 2022’s. We set the two episodes side by side at money supply and inflation. And the climb since March 2023 has not been monotonic: the level reached $28.93 trillion by December 2024 and $30.68 trillion by December 2025, but three individual quarters on the way — June 2023, September 2023 and June 2024 — each read lower than the quarter before.

Where the US ranks among 159 economies on money growth

Every US-centric explainer treats the United States as though it were the whole world. Ranked against the 159 economies with a usable 10-year growth rate, the US’s 6.6%-a-year pace lands 116th — not near the top, not near the bottom, closer to the slow end of the distribution than the fast one.

By the latest 12 months alone, the US ranks 114th of 162. South Sudan leads the full ranking at 69.6% a year; Dominica sits at the other end, 1.07% a year, needing about 65 years to double at that rate. The United States’ 10.9-year doubling time sits far closer to Dominica’s end of that range than South Sudan’s. Full table: money supply growth ranking.

What actually grows US money supply: banks, not the printing press

Commercial banks create most of US money supply, not the Federal Reserve. A bank issues a loan and credits the borrower’s deposit account in the same instant. That deposit is new M2 the moment it posts, per the Bank of England’s own account of the mechanism: Money creation in the modern economy (Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1). The Fed’s own tools work on a narrower layer. Quantitative easing, and its reverse, quantitative tightening, buy or run off bonds — crediting or draining bank reserves, the monetary base, not the money supply directly. Reserves only become new M2 once a bank lends against them, and that step isn’t automatic. We cover the full base-vs-broad distinction, including why 2008’s base explosion didn’t produce a proportional M2 explosion, at monetary base vs money supply.

Whether M2 keeps growing through 2026 depends on that same lending channel continuing — not on a Fed decision to “print” or not. We don’t forecast which way lending goes. What the data already shows is the trend in motion. US broad money has added $3.43 trillion since the 2022-23 contraction ended, rising from $27.25 trillion in March 2023 to $30.68 trillion in December 2025 — most recently 6.0% in the year to December 2025.

Does a high M2 mean the US economy is doing well?

No, not on its own. The United States carries the second-largest broad-money total we track — $30.68 trillion, behind only China’s $42.64 trillion (2024) — while ranking 115th of 159 on growth. A big level and a middling growth rate aren’t a contradiction. They measure different things: level reflects decades of deposits accumulated inside a large, developed banking system; growth reflects how fast that stock is currently expanding. A reader asking “is a high M2 good” is usually really asking about the growth side. By that measure, the US isn’t printing unusually fast by world standards — whatever the $30.68 trillion headline suggests on its own. What M2 does and doesn’t measure, in general, is covered at M2 money supply.

FAQ