How much money is in the system
Related: Business cycle · KM Cycle Index
Liquidity against the Bitcoin price
Fed balance sheet − Treasury account − reverse repo · source: FRED (WALCL, WTREGEN, RRPONTSYD) · data as of 8/12/2026
The lead is computed from the data: we take the yearly change in liquidity and the yearly change in the BTC price on a weekly grid and look for the shift that makes the two series fit each other most closely. The number moves with every update, and correlation is not causation — it only measures how often the two went the same way.
Global liquidity is not a single number
What is in it: How many dollars are actually inside the financial system. The Fed can keep its balance sheet flat, but when the Treasury fills its account at the Fed (TGA) or banks park cash in reverse repo, that money leaves the market. It updates weekly and moves fastest of the three.
What it misses: It only sees America. Easing in China or Japan is nowhere in it.
What is in it: Cash, checking and savings accounts and money market funds. The classic broad money supply — what people mean when they say money is being printed. It reacts more slowly than the balance sheet but measures money in people's hands rather than bank reserves.
What it misses: It only picks up a central bank move with a lag, and it misses liquidity flowing through the shadow banking system.
What is in it: The three largest central bank balance sheets converted to dollars at the current exchange rate. This is the closest thing to what people call global liquidity: it captures Japan easing while the Fed sits still. The exchange rate is part of the story — a weak dollar by itself raises the dollar value of foreign balance sheets and loosens global financial conditions.
What it misses: China is missing. No free source with long, current history of Chinese M2 exists, so the aggregate is honestly labelled G3 rather than global.
Liquidity is the fuel of risk assets. When money in the system grows, some of it ends up in equities and crypto; when it shrinks, prices fall even without bad news. The Bitcoin cycle therefore overlaps a good deal with liquidity cycles — except that "global liquidity" is not one indicator. Every chart doing the rounds online measures something slightly different, and the conclusions differ accordingly.
That is why three measures sit side by side here. Net Fed liquidity is the fastest and narrowest, M2 the slowest and broadest, and the G3 balance sheets come closest to what people call global. Each one states what it contains and what it misses, because that is what decides whether its signal means anything.
For every measure we compute how many weeks it has historically led the Bitcoin price. That is a measurement, not a forecast: correlation is not causation, and the longer leads (ten weeks and up) rest on roughly ten years of data — a handful of independent cycles.