Gold to M2 Money Supply Ratio: Gold Price Divided by US Money Stock, Monthly Since 1960

The gold to M2 money supply ratio measures the dollar price of an ounce of gold against the size of the US money stock. It is an Eco3min composite, built by dividing the monthly gold price published in the World Bank Pink Sheet by US M2 as published by the Federal Reserve, and it runs monthly from January 1960 across 799 observations. The point of the gold to M2 ratio is that it asks a different question from the gold price alone: not whether gold has risen, but whether it has risen faster than the money stock it is quoted in. Since 1960 gold has multiplied by 116 while M2 has multiplied by 78, and the ratio records the uneven path between those two numbers.

Dataset: Gold to M2 Money Supply Ratio (1960–2026) · Updated 2026-07-01

Source: World Bank Commodity Price Data (gold) and Federal Reserve M2SL via FRED · Eco3min composite

Macro Takeaway

Construction & Components

The composite isolates the gold price from the growth of the dollar money stock in which it is quoted. It removes nothing about gold itself and adds no adjustment for inflation, real rates or currency: it is a single division, chosen so that the denominator is a quantity of money rather than a price index.

Formula:

gold_m2_ratio = gold_price / m2_billions

Components:

• Gold price – World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), US dollars per troy ounce – monthly. The numerator, a globally traded price.
• US M2 money supply – Federal Reserve series M2SL, billions of US dollars, seasonally adjusted – monthly. The denominator, a domestic monetary aggregate.

Frequency reconciliation: both components are natively monthly. The pipeline aligns M2 to a month-start index, takes the last available observation for each month, and inner-joins the two series, so a value exists only for months where both print. There is no interpolation and no forward-fill.

Coverage: January 1960 to the present, 799 monthly observations. The start is set by the Pink Sheet gold series rather than by M2, which FRED publishes from 1959.

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV, Excel and JSON files contain the following columns.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly. Both inputs are shipped alongside the derived ratio, so the division can be reproduced from the file itself.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full gold to M2 ratio dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats.

Direct CSV Access – Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/gold-m2-ratio.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format, with both inputs and the derived ratio. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool. There is no single upstream code for the ratio: it is an Eco3min calculation. The M2 leg is available from FRED as series M2SL, and the gold leg from the World Bank Commodity Price Data workbook.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/gold-m2-ratio.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

print(df.tail())
print(df["gold_m2_ratio"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/gold-m2-ratio.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

tail(df)
summary(df$gold_m2_ratio)

Both examples load the dataset directly from the URL, with no download or API key required.

Methodology

The ratio is recomputed by an Eco3min pipeline that pulls the gold price from the World Bank Commodity Price Data workbook and the M2 series from the FRED API, then combines them according to the formula in Construction & Components. The World Bank publishes the Pink Sheet monthly, with the gold price given as a monthly average in US dollars per troy ounce. M2 is the Federal Reserve’s seasonally adjusted monthly series, released with roughly a one-month lag.

The full CSV is regenerated on each run rather than appended, so a revision to either input propagates through the whole derived series automatically. Because the composite is an inner join, a month appears only once both legs have published; in practice this means the newest observation is set by whichever of the two is slower to release.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Latency is dictated by the slower input. The Pink Sheet and M2 both publish monthly, but not on the same calendar. The composite cannot be fresher than the later of the two, which is why the last observation can trail the current month by more than the M2 lag alone would suggest.

Revisions propagate backwards. M2 is revised, including for seasonal-adjustment factors that are re-estimated annually. When that happens the ratio changes for every month affected, not only the latest. Eco3min replaces the entire file on each run rather than patching the tail, so the published series always reflects the current vintage of both inputs.

The denominator has not been measured the same way for 66 years. The Federal Reserve has revised the composition of its monetary aggregates more than once over this history. A comparison between a 1960s reading and a 2020s reading therefore spans changes in the definition of the denominator as well as changes in the two quantities. The FRED series notes for M2SL record those changes.

The March to May 2020 jump is real, and it is the largest in the series. M2 rose 3.50% in March 2020, 6.42% in April and 5.09% in May: the three largest monthly increases in the whole 1960–2026 record, in consecutive months. From February 2020 to December 2021 M2 grew 39%. Any ratio reading from that period reflects a denominator moving faster than it ever had before.

Alternative sources. No provider publishes this ratio as a native series. Both inputs are individually free and public, which is what makes the composite reproducible from the file itself.

What This Index Captures (And What It Doesn’t)

The ratio is a regime-classification tool for reading gold against monetary expansion. It is not a valuation model and not a fair-value estimate.

What it captures:

• Whether the gold price is outpacing or lagging the growth of the US money stock, over horizons long enough for both to move meaningfully.
• The position of a current reading inside its own 66-year distribution, which is what the percentile in the key stats above reports.
• The distinction between a gold move driven by the metal and one that merely keeps pace with monetary expansion, which a dollar price alone cannot separate.

What it does NOT capture (common misinterpretations):

• An economically meaningful absolute level. The numerator is a price per ounce and the denominator a stock in billions of dollars, so the quotient has no natural unit and no natural benchmark. A reading of 0.17 means nothing on its own; it means something only against the other 798 readings in the file. Anyone quoting the level without the distribution is quoting a number with no scale.
• A closed system. Gold is priced globally and held globally; M2 is a United States aggregate. The ratio pairs a world price with one country’s money stock, which is a deliberate simplification and not an accounting identity. The same exercise against euro-area or global monetary aggregates would give a different series.
• A fair value for gold. Nothing in the construction implies a level the ratio ought to return to. The 1980 peak and the 2001 trough are both part of the same distribution, and the series has spent long stretches far from its median in both directions.
• Inflation adjustment. Dividing by the money stock is not the same operation as deflating by a price index. The two diverge whenever money growth and consumer-price growth diverge, which over this history is most of the time. The CPI-adjusted gold price answers the other question, and the two series are complements rather than substitutes.

Read as a distribution rather than as a level, the series is most useful for placing a current episode against prior ones.

Historical Regimes

1960–1970 – The fixed-price era. Gold stays at or below $36 an ounce through September 1970 while M2 grows from $298bn to over $600bn. With a pinned numerator and an expanding denominator, the ratio can only fall: from 0.1174 in January 1960 to 0.0683 by January 1968 and 0.0627 by August 1971. The decade averages 0.0866, and the decline is an artifact of the monetary arrangement rather than a market judgement on gold.

1971–1980 – Repricing after the gold window. Once the dollar’s convertibility ended, the numerator was free to move and did so violently. The ratio reaches its all-time high of 0.4553 in January 1980, with February at 0.4450 and a second cluster in July, September and October of the same year between 0.4160 and 0.4282. The decade averages 0.1258, but that figure understates the end of it.

1980–1989 – The highest decade average, and a long descent. The 1980s average 0.1950, the highest of any decade in the series, because the early years hold near the peak before a sustained slide. Disinflation and positive real rates reversed the conditions of the previous decade while M2 kept growing.

1990–2001 – The trough. The 1990s average 0.0971 and the 2000s open lower still. The absolute minimum of 0.0506 comes in April 2001, with November and December of the same year at 0.0512 and 0.0507. Gold at $284 in January 2000 sat against an M2 of $4,666bn: the numerator had gone nowhere for two decades while the denominator had more than tripled.

2001–2011 – Reflation. The ratio climbs from its low to 0.1855 in September 2011, its highest reading since October 1983. The global financial crisis is visible mid-course, with the ratio at 0.1054 in September 2008 as both legs moved at once.

2012–2020 – Money grows faster than gold. The 2010s average 0.1187, but the second half of the decade sits well below the first as M2 expansion outran a flat gold price. By March 2020 the ratio was back to 0.0993, close to its long-run median despite the crisis under way.

2021–2026 – The numerator takes over. After the pandemic surge in M2, the ratio opened 2024 at 0.0976 and averaged 0.1129 over that year, before gold doubled from $2,034 to $4,073 between January 2024 and July 2026 against 11% growth in M2. The July 2026 reading of 0.1754 sits at the 89.5th percentile of the full history, in the company of 1974–1975, 1979–1984 and 2011–2012.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

The ratio sits between a gold family and a money-supply family; both sides are published separately.

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min macro-financial data repository.

Explore the Eco3min Dataset Hub

Sources

• World Bank – Commodity Price Data (the Pink Sheet), gold, US dollars per troy ounce, monthly
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System – M2 money stock, seasonally adjusted, series M2SL via FRED
• Eco3min Research – gold to M2 ratio composite calculation

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). Gold to M2 Money Supply Ratio, Monthly Data (1960–2026).<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/gold-m2-money-supply-ratio-dataset/