About — MonetaryData.com

A plain-English reference for U.S. money supply and consumer prices, refreshed weekly from official Federal Reserve data.

What this is

MonetaryData.com publishes the two series most people mean when they say "the money supply" and "inflation" — M2, the broadest widely-cited measure of U.S. money, and CPI-U, the official U.S. consumer price index. The headline reading on the home page is the weekly M2 figure from the Federal Reserve's H.6 release. The inflation calculator and money supply calculator let you translate a dollar amount from any year into another. The Learn section explains what each series is and how the Federal Reserve produces it.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this site is sourced from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data service. Three series drive the entire site:

WM2NS — M2 money supply, weekly, not seasonally adjusted. This is the finest-frequency M2 series the Federal Reserve publishes.
M2SL — M2 money supply, monthly, seasonally adjusted. This is the series used for year-over-year headlines in the press.
CPIAUCNS — CPI for all urban consumers, monthly, not seasonally adjusted. Published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics; history back to 1913.

The site refreshes these series weekly. The M2 H.6 release publishes Tuesdays at 1:00 p.m. Eastern; CPI publishes monthly. Cached readings on the site are labeled with the date of the last refresh.

What is done to the numbers

Almost nothing. The site republishes the underlying values without altering them. Derived readings — week-over-week change, year-over-year change, cumulative change since a chosen year, annual averages for calculator use — are computed directly from the source series and their formulas are stated on each page. There is no proprietary index or model here; there is no forecasting.

Voice

There is no marketing layer over the math. The site does not tell you whether M2 growth is good or bad, whether inflation is high or low relative to a policy target, or what the Federal Reserve should do. It reports what the series show and translates them into calculators and reference pages that a reader can use.

Clay Indices family

MonetaryData.com is part of the Clay Indices family, administered by George Clay. Clay Indices publishes reference sites, methodology documents, and rules-based financial indices. Sibling sites include the Supply Chain Index, the Time Price Index, the Total Market Index, and the Unfiltered Data reference. The full family is at clayindices.com.

Attribution

The underlying data is public and produced by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved via FRED. This site is an independent presentation of that data and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nothing here is investment advice.