“I would like to thank you for attempting to educate the average clueless soul like myself in this arena of finance. Sorry, I still have not found an article or book that comes anywhere in explaining what M1 and M2 is. Still clueless.”
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From the St. Louis Fed:
- M1: The sum of currency held outside the vaults of depository institutions, Federal Reserve Banks, and the U.S. Treasury; travelers checks; and demand and other checkable deposits issued by financial institutions (except demand deposits due to the Treasury and depository institutions), minus cash items in process of collection and Federal Reserve float.
- MZM (money, zero maturity): M2 minus small-denomination time deposits, plus institutional money market mutual funds (that is, those included in M3 but excluded from M2). The label MZM was coined by William Poole (1991); the aggregate itself was proposed earlier by Motley (1988).
- M2: M1 plus savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts) and small-denomination (under $100,000) time deposits issued by financial institutions; and shares in retail money market mutual funds (funds with initial investments under $50,000), net of retirement accounts.
- M3: M2 plus large-denomination ($100,000 or more) time deposits; repurchase agreements issued by depository institutions; Eurodollar deposits, specifically, dollar-denominated deposits due to nonbank U.S. addresses held at foreign offices of U.S. banks worldwide and all banking offices in Canada and the United Kingdom; and institutional money market mutual funds (funds with initial investments of $50,000 or more).
- Bank Credit: All loans, leases, and securities held by commercial banks.
- Domestic Nonfinancial Debt: Total credit market liabilities of the U.S. Treasury, federally sponsored agencies, state and local governments, households, and nonfinancial firms. End-of-period basis.
- Adjusted Monetary Base: The sum of currency in circulation outside Federal Reserve Banks and the U.S. Treasury, deposits of depository financial institutions at Federal Reserve Banks, and an adjustment for the effects of changes in statutory reserve requirements on the quantity of base money held by depositories. This series is a spliced chain index; see Anderson and Rasche (1996a,b, 2001, 2003).
- Adjusted Reserves: The sum of vault cash and Federal Reserve Bank deposits held by depository institutions and an adjustment for the effects of changes in statutory reserve requirements on the quantity of base money held by depositories. This spliced chain index is numerically larger than the Board of Governors’ measure, which excludes vault cash not used to satisfy statutory reserve requirements and Federal Reserve Bank deposits used to satisfy required clearing balance contracts; see Anderson and Rasche (1996a, 2001, 2003).
- Monetary Services Index: An index that measures the flow of monetary services received by households and firms from their holdings of liquid assets; see Anderson, Jones, and Nesmith (1997). Indexes are shown for the assets included in M2, with additional data at research.stlouisfed.org/msi/index.html.
- Note: M1, M2, M3, Bank Credit, and Domestic Nonfinancial Debt are constructed and published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. For details, see Federal Reserve Bulletin, tables 1.21 and 1.26. MZM, Adjusted Monetary Base, Adjusted Reserves, and Monetary Services Index are constructed and published by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Posted by Mises.org Correspondence
