[shenberg]

"since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation" - I've seen this notion repeated and I assume it's a reference to M1 as published by FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.

To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1dwhY

The rule-change coincided with COVID relief measures which did include money-printing, but at a much smaller scale than implied.

[climatekid]

Wow this is very helpful. I'd heard that as well. Thanks for commenting this