What it measures
Money supply — expanding liquidity eventually finds its way into risk assets.
M2 is the broad US money supply: cash, checking and savings deposits, and retail money-market funds. It is the standard gauge of how much money exists in the system — and for crypto, the backdrop variable behind the debasement thesis: Bitcoin’s hardest bull case is priced in a currency whose supply keeps growing.
How to read it
M2 moves slowly, so read the growth rate, not the level. Expansion above ~3 % a year has historically been a supportive backdrop for risk assets — liquidity eventually finds its way outward on the risk curve. Outright contraction is rare (2022–23 was the first meaningful decline in decades) and marks genuinely restrictive conditions. M2 sets the tide; it says nothing about the next wave.
Theses riding on this indicator
Moonkelp reads every indicator through investment theses — pick yours and the daily briefing shows what supports or threatens it.
Frequently asked questions
What is included in M2?
Physical currency, checking deposits, savings deposits, small time deposits and retail money-market funds — the money households and firms can spend or quickly mobilize. It excludes large institutional instruments.
Why do Bitcoin investors watch M2?
The store-of-value case for Bitcoin is an argument about monetary debasement: a fixed 21-million supply measured against a fiat supply that structurally grows. M2 is the series that quantifies that growth, which is why sustained expansion is read as a tailwind for hard assets.
How often is M2 updated?
The Federal Reserve publishes M2 monthly, with a lag of a few weeks. Moonkelp reads the official series from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED API; the chart shows the full published history, downsampled.
Data & method
Collected automatically by the Moonkelp agent, validated against plausibility bands before anything is written. How the pipeline works →
Related indicators
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