M2 Money Supply versus Global Net Liquidity

M2 is getting a lot of attention, but is it really driving markets? M2 is the Federal Reserve's estimate of the total money supply including all cash hand, money deposited in checking accounts, savings accounts, and other short term savings. The rate of change for M2 over the past 3 years has been the steepest incline and decline in the M2 rate of change in history. However, global net liquidity, which is driven by fractional reserve banking and credit expansion from cycling credit between central banks and the private sector, as far greater impact on markets and is more strongly correlated than M2.

In the fall of 2021 the Federal Reserve announced the end of quantitative and monetary easing, marking the top of the market for risk assets. Other central banks followed suit and interest rates increases and liquidity tightening started in the beginning of 2022. This contraction is highlighted in the red box in the center of the chart. The white line in the center marks the liquidity bottom that we observed in the fall of 2022 which also marks the bottom for risk assets. The green box highlights the expansion in liquidity that begins immediately after with a correlated and coincident rise in risk assets. Note that M2 has continued to contract and interest rates hikes have continued during this time.

Michael Howell regularly tweets timely and insightful updates on global liquidity. I highly recommend following him @crossbordercap twitter.com/crossbordercap. Thank you to Codi0 and to dharmatech for their work on the liquidity indicators. These are fantastic editions to macroeconomic and monetary analysis.

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Beyond Technical AnalysisFOMCFundamental AnalysisliquidityM2M2SLmoneysupplyTrend Analysis

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