I think I’m in the same position as @curtis3389: I can look at the surprising — nay, shocking — graph, but I have no idea if I should care, as the one thing it definitely doesn’t mean is the 400% inflation that graph naively implies.

As you say, there are other relevant metrics; I don’t know those metrics, I just know they must exist.

How should I interpret this? There’s a huge jump in may 2020, but apparently the metric was redefined in may 2020 to include more stuff?

from the Q&A page linked at the bottom:

> Recognizing savings deposits as a transaction account as of May 2020 will cause a series break in the M1 monetary aggregate. Beginning with the May 2020 observation, M1 will increase by the size of the industry total of savings deposits, which amounted to approximately $11.2 trillion

So is it a rethread of the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26974607 but omitting absolutely all relevant context?

The tl;dr from that thread that there is a jump in M1 from a change in what counts as M1/not M1, making that chart very misleading from a glance. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL is a lot less misleading - but of course that's the point.

> You can just look at the M1 money supply.

You can just look at the weblog post about the M1 money supply change as well:

> […] the modification of Regulation D in late April has effectively rendered savings accounts almost indistinguishable from checking accounts from the perspective of depositors and banks. Accordingly, the composition of M2 between M1 and non-M1 components conveys little economic information.

* https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/01/whats-behind-the-rec...