Twenty-ninth quarterly update on central bank money around the world.
This is about central bank money. The central bank money supply. This is also called reserve money, outside money, and high-powered money.
The monetary base.
It is the only money supply that is economically and legally comparable to gold, silver, and bitcoins.
For seven-plus years I've been bringing them altogether for you with this research.
This is what it is. It's currency produced by the central bank of each nation, comprising two distinct supplies:
- Physical currency: $9.8 trillion equivalent. Notes and coins, or “cash.” In older economic textbooks, this money supply is in fact referred to as “currency.”
- Bank reserves: $17.2 trillion equivalent. The “Master account” that each commercial bank holds with its central bank. This is the dominance, high-powered, digital base money of today.
When I am referring to USD equivalent values above, these are calculated from central bank (and some black market) exchange rates for the top 50 currencies in the world. But note, there are indeed 50 individual currencies behind these numbers.
$27.0 trillion total fiat base money value
As of 30 June 2024, it is only the balance sheets of the big four central banks that are larger than Bitcoin. These currencies are:
- Federal Reserve (dollar): $5.75 trillion
- People's Bank of China (yuan): $5.29 trillion equivalent
- European Central Bank (euro): $5.26 trillion equivalent
- Bank of Japan (yen): $4.53 trillion equivalent
Here is the total fiat base money supply in the world:
If we remove gold from the equation (and we shouldn't), then Bitcoin could be considered the fifth largest money in the world.
What about gold & silver?
Including gold, Bitcoin is the sixth largest money in the world.
The all-important monetary metal throughout history that even a child knows about; that is, gold, is still king at around $20.0 trillion in value, or 5.9 billion ounces available worldwide. Note, this does not include gold lost or recycled through industry; in that case, it is estimated that about 7 billion ounces of gold have been mined throughout humanity.
Silver, for what it's worth, is still a big “monetary” metal; though it is true, much more silver is gobbled up in industry compared to gold. There are about 31 billion ounces of non-industrial silver floating around the world (most of it in jewelry and silverware form) that is valued in today's prices at about $1.2 trillion. Bitcoin bigger.
Big picture
Putting them altogether, the monetary stack looks like this in terms of USD equivalent value:
All-time supply (monetary) inflation: 12.7% per year compounded
This is a long-term, "smoothed" monetary inflation, or money growth figure. It is looking across all the 50 currencies in my sample, going back to 31 December 1969 for almost 40% of them, and for those that don't, simply adding them into the weighted basket as data becomes available.
Roughly stated, it means that central banks on balance double their money supply every 5.8 years. This is a fact.
For more detail, check out this visual below:
Trailing 12-month money growth: -0.9%
Even though the global, weighted average money print has been around 12.7% as mentioned above, central banks indeed have been trying to tighten from their overheated 2020-22 money print.
In native, weighted terms they are down about 0.9% globally over the last 12 months. Here is how that looks per currency:
Still very low on the print
The net effect of all this is that, as has been stated in the past few quarterly updates, we are still very low in terms of where the monetary base sits relative to trend. If we run a simple, USD-based trendline analysis for all global currencies in the dataset (see below), we should have a $35+ trillion monetary base right now, based on past performance. We have a $27.0 trillion monetary base right now. This is around the 1st percentile from the trendline - extremely low:
This is the whole thing
I have been working on this chart for quite some time, and I stream about this on most weekday mornings, 9AM London time.
We can put all the above information together, to see where the Bitcoin system fits in the monetary world. It is here, and it is the real Bitcoin dominance index:
The above chart separates Bitcoin from the rest of global central bank money.
As of right now, global gold, silver, and unbacked fiat base money is $43.6 trillion.
Bitcoin was $2.1 trillion in June (quarter end), and about $2.2 trillion now.
Bitcoin is nearly 5% of global money.
If you're wondering when they cross; my latest estimate is 2043, around $155 trillion each.
It was a quick journey. Here is a progression of how quickly Bitcoin passed each individual currency's monetary base over the last 16 years. As you can see, it is only the big four that are left:
And here is the global summary of fiat money, gold, silver, and Bitcoin. Print it out if you like! I update it every quarter:
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