My personal favorite is not listed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
M2V is the velocity of M2, roughly: How fast money is changing hands via transactions.
M2V is the velocity of M2, roughly: How fast money is changing hands via transactions.
Articles written for an informed audience don't need to dumb down their charts by starting at zero. The authors assume the readers have eyes and can see where the charts begin and end.
For the specific article in question, the lowest value on the chart is 1.450, and dropping the axis down to zero would not add any useful information; it would just add whitespace. It's a chart with linear axes that is sized to capture the entire range of data. There is no trickery there.
Shifting the y-axis CAN be used to manipulate how the data is perceived, but that doesn't mean it ALWAYS should start at 0. In fact, that can sometimes also be very misleading.
David Doyle, economist at Macquarie Capital Markets Ltd.
Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank AG.
Jordan Rochester, foreign-exchange strategist at Nomura.
Barnaby Martin, European credit strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik, economists at Bloomberg Intelligence.
...haters are going to hate, I suppose.
For comparison, Feroli's data has a strictly positive range, but the graph starts at -5. Martin even went so far as to include two y-axes on the same graph, yet only one of them started at 0.
If capitalized reserves were not in M2 we would probably still have seen a decrease in M2V in 2008-2010, but not nearly as drastic, and it probably would be about flat since then, approximately tracking inflation.