A giant spike in M2 in 2020, and yet at the same time the S&P 500 dropped. M2 has been on a downward trend since April 2022, and the S&P 500 bottomed in ~October 2022, but has been rising since then—while at the same time M2 has been dropping.
you're missing the investor preferences bit. You could print $7T or whatever crazy amount Sam Altman wants, and if everyone puts that money under their mattress instead of stocks or spending, there will be no observable effect on the real or financial economy. In short, the transmission mechanism of money creation to real effects is laggy and and somewhat unpredictable. e.g. why NVDA and not gold?
> you're missing the investor preferences bit. You could print $7T or whatever crazy amount Sam Altman wants, and if everyone puts that money under their mattress instead of stocks or spending, there will be no observable effect on the real or financial economy.
If you go through my posting history you'll see I've more than once mentioned that velocity is much more important than simple quantity.
A good analogy from Cullen Roche that I often use:
> But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy.
You know whose M2 has also been rising for decades? Japan's. And yet for most of that time the Nikkei has been flat (even negative):
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17sx4
China's M2 has also been going up steadily:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MYAGM2CNM189N
What has the Shanghai Stock Exchange (index) been doing lately?
The UK's M2 has been going up continuously:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSM2UKQ
How's the FTSE 100?
> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
Now let's overlay the S&P 500:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1gvKR
A giant spike in M2 in 2020, and yet at the same time the S&P 500 dropped. M2 has been on a downward trend since April 2022, and the S&P 500 bottomed in ~October 2022, but has been rising since then—while at the same time M2 has been dropping.