M2 is the official count of the dollars people can spend: cash, current accounts and savings. It is published weeks after the month it counts, so this page prints the publication date beside every number and puts bitcoin on the same axis of time.
5.7% how fast the count grew, year over year · monthly count, seasonally adjusted on Aug-01 2026, the last day in this build, read from a public record, published by askthetape.com.
M2 is the Federal Reserve's own count of the dollars people can actually spend — notes and coins, current accounts, savings and the small deposits beside them. On 2026-08-01 it stood at $23.34 trillion. It is not a fast number, and this page refuses to let it look like one: the point stamped 2026-08-01 was published on 2026-09-22. That is 22 days after the month it counts ended — published with a lag of 3 weeks — and 52 days after the date the series itself carries. The weekly count landed the same day, 22 days after its own Monday. Two counts are drawn because the publisher keeps two. The monthly one is seasonally adjusted and reaches back to 1959-01-01, 812 points; the weekly one is not adjusted at all, starts 1981-01-05, and saws inside every month because paydays and tax dates are left in it. Year over year the monthly count grew +5.66% on 2026-08-01; across its whole record it has been as fast as +26.78% (2021-02-01) and as slow as -4.64% (2023-04-01), and only 15 of 800 readings ever sat below zero. Now the part a chart like this is usually used to hide. The LEVEL of M2 against the logarithm of bitcoin's price gives a correlation of +0.89 over 193 months — a number that looks like a law and is two things that both drifted upward for a decade. Take the drift out and ask about CHANGES instead: M2's year-over-year growth against bitcoin's own twelve-month change is +0.077 over 181 months, and the 60-day change in the weekly count against bitcoin's 60-day change is -0.006 over 833 weeks. All three are printed here on purpose. It is a description of a published number, not a forecast.
| leg | FRED public series M2SL — monthly, seasonally adjusted, billions of dollars, 812 points from 1959-01-01 — and FRED public series WM2NS — weekly, ending monday, not seasonally adjusted, 2,383 points from 1981-01-05. Both arrive through our own updater (fred_api, last pull 2026-10-20 06:07Z) in one file, year-over-year columns included. Bitcoin is our own Bitstamp daily-close leg and rides the standard price overlay rather than a second axis: two scales on one picture can be tuned until they agree, and this site does not do that. |
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| cadence | the whole release lands once a month: the monthly point and every weekly point are republished together in the same H.6 statement, so they all move on the same day. Between two releases nothing on this page changes — a flat right edge here is the calendar, not a broken feed. |
| since | 1959-01-01 (monthly, 812 points, widest step between two stamps 31 days) · 1981-01-05 (weekly, 2,383 points across 45 years, widest step 7 days) |
| 🩸 published with a lag, and the lag is the point | the last monthly point carries the date 2026-08-01 and was published on 2026-09-22 — 52 days later, 22 days after that month actually ended, so as you read this it is 83 days old and that is NORMAL. The weekly point 2026-08-31 was published the same day, 22 days after its Monday. Measured against the publisher's own release calendar on 2026-09-12 (FRED release 21, H.6 Money Stock Measures, 74 statements since 2021-01-01, pulled 2026-09-12 18:25Z): the statement comes once a month, median 28 days apart, never more than 35; across those 74 the newest monthly point was never fresher than 41 days and never older than 88, and the newest weekly point never older than 56. The freshness check on this site carries exactly those numbers, so an ordinary month cannot paint this page stale and a real break still can. |
| 🩸 the two counts are not the same measurement | the monthly line is seasonally adjusted — a statistical hand has been passed over it to take the shape of the calendar out. The weekly line has not been touched, which is why it saws. Each one's last point: $23,342.8B on 2026-08-01 (monthly) and $23,305.5B on 2026-08-31 (weekly) — close, because they count the same thing, and not interchangeable, which is why both are drawn instead of one being called «M2». |
| 🩸 the correlation that means nothing | M2's LEVEL against the logarithm of bitcoin's price is +0.89 over 193 months. Almost anything that rose for a decade scores like that against anything else that rose for a decade; it is the oldest trick available on a two-line chart. The honest question is whether the CHANGES move together, and there the answer is +0.08 (year-over-year growth against bitcoin's twelve-month change, 181 months) and -0.006 (60-day change against 60-day change, 833 weeks). All three sit on this page so the picture cannot be read as one. |
| 🩸 sixty days on a weekly grid | the money count prints once a week, on Mondays, so «60 days ago» has no exact point in it. The change is measured against the nearest earlier Monday: on this build that is exactly 3 days off the mark on every one of the 2,374 points, because sixty days back from a Monday is a Thursday. The allowance is 7 days, and a stamp further back than that drops the point instead of stretching to it. Bitcoin's own 60-day view is a separate view on the same dates — flip between them rather than reading two scales on one chart. |
| what differs | the publication date travels with the number. Most places draw M2 with its last point at the right edge as though it were today's; here the stamp, the publication day and the age in days are printed on the page, in the badge and in the freshness check — and the correlation that flatters the chart is printed next to the two that deflate it. |
| thinner here | we do not own this number and cannot check it. It is the Federal Reserve's count, and if the Board revises its history the shape changes underneath us with no seam we could see; there is no second, independent copy of M2 on this site to compare it against, the way there are two independent counts of the crypto market elsewhere on the shelf. The page is also slow by construction — it can only change once a month. |
| credit | the two series are FRED public series M2SL and WM2NS, served by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; the numbers themselves are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), H.6 Money Stock Measures. Both are named because both made it. |
| policy | no export · both series are public and we keep our own copy of them · read it here · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive |
| this build | data to Aug-01 2026 |
| policy | no backfill · no export · read it here · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive |
The chart itself is drawn in the browser: turn JavaScript on to hover a day, pick a window and draw your line. The numbers above come from the last build, Oct-23 2026 21:24Z.
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