Macro Charts
14 charts. Part of the chart reference.
Inflation YoY
US CPI and core CPI, year-over-year.
Headline CPI includes everything; core strips food and energy to show the underlying trend the Fed actually steers by. Both are year-over-year changes in the official index — the number that sets the policy weather for every risk asset.
The 2021–2023 spike to 9% and its aftermath created the QT regime that defined crypto's last bear market. Inflation returning toward the 2% target is what allows easing — which is why this unglamorous line sits upstream of most charts on this site.
M1 / M2 Money Supply
US money supply since 1959, log scale.
M1 is money you can spend now (currency + checking); M2 adds savings and money-market funds. The log scale shows six decades of monetary expansion — including the unprecedented 2020 vertical, when M2 grew ~25% in a year.
Bitcoin's entire pitch is legible against this backdrop: a fixed-supply asset priced in an expanding unit. The 2022–2023 stretch was the first meaningful M2 contraction since the 1940s — precisely the crypto bear — before growth resumed.
Fed Balance Sheet & ON RRP
Fed total assets alongside the overnight reverse repo facility.
Two plumbing gauges: the Fed's total assets (the QE/QT dial) and the overnight reverse repo facility, where money-market funds park excess cash. RRP drained from $2.5T to near zero through 2023–24 — a drain that quietly offset QT and cushioned markets.
Net-liquidity thinking (balance sheet minus RRP and the Treasury's account) is why 2023 equities rallied through QT. With RRP empty, QT bites directly — and its end, visible in the balance sheet flattening, is the regime change the QT chart tracks against BTC.
Treasury Yield Spreads
The 10y−2y and 10y−3m Treasury spreads — the recession signal.
When short rates exceed long rates (spread below zero), the curve is inverted: markets expect rate cuts ahead, historically because a recession forces them. Inversion has preceded every US recession for half a century.
The nuance the chart shows: recessions historically start not at inversion but at the re-steepening — when the spread races back above zero as the Fed cuts into weakness. For crypto, the steepening phase has coincided with the liquidity turns that end bear markets.
Fed Funds Rate
The federal funds effective rate since 1954.
The price of money itself. Every hiking and easing cycle since 1954 in one line — including the 2022 sprint from zero to 5%+, the fastest since Volcker, which repriced every asset on earth.
Bitcoin has now lived through one full hiking cycle, and the correlation was unambiguous: crypto's 2021 top arrived as hikes were priced in, the bottom as they peaked. Cuts are the fuel every crypto bull thesis quietly assumes.
Unemployment & Payrolls
The unemployment rate and total nonfarm payrolls.
The Fed's second mandate. Unemployment is a stair-stepper: it falls slowly for years and spikes fast in recessions — the spikes align with every recession since 1948.
For markets the rule of thumb inverts intuition: deteriorating employment historically forces easing (good for liquidity-sensitive assets, eventually), while red-hot labor markets sustain tight policy. The Sahm rule — a 0.5pt rise in unemployment off its low — is the classic recession trigger visible here.
GDP & Debt-to-GDP
Nominal US GDP and federal debt as a share of GDP.
Output and the leverage carried against it. Debt-to-GDP crossing 100% and staying there post-2020 is the fiscal backdrop for the "debasement trade" — the argument that deficits eventually force accommodative policy regardless of inflation.
This is the slowest-moving chart on the site and the one underpinning the longest-horizon Bitcoin thesis: fixed-supply assets as insurance against fiscal dominance. Quarterly data; decades matter here, not months.
Personal Income & Saving Rate
Real personal income (ex transfers) and the personal saving rate.
Real income ex-transfers is the organic earning power of households — one of the four official recession-dating indicators. The saving rate shows what's left after spending: its 2020 spike to 30%+ (stimulus with nowhere to go) was the retail wave that flooded into markets, crypto included.
A saving rate scraping historic lows alongside flat real income is the squeezed-consumer signature — historically late-cycle, and part of why discretionary risk appetite (the fuel of alt seasons) has been thin this cycle.
Consumer Sentiment (MCSI)
The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index since 1952.
Seven decades of how Americans feel about the economy. The 2022 print was the lowest in the survey's history — below both oil crises and 2008 — driven by inflation's unique power to sour sentiment.
Sentiment is contrarian at extremes: historic lows have been better buying moments than selling ones, for equities and (in its short history) crypto alike. The interesting divergence is sentiment versus spending — people who feel terrible but keep spending have repeatedly postponed predicted recessions.
Housing Starts & New Home Sales
New residential construction and new single-family home sales.
Housing is the economy's most interest-rate-sensitive sector and its most reliable early-cycle indicator — starts roll over a year or more before recessions and trough before recoveries.
The post-2022 freeze is textbook: 7% mortgages froze both construction and sales. Housing turning up while the Fed still holds tight would be the classic early-recovery divergence to watch for.
House Prices & Mortgage Rates
Case-Shiller national home price index against the 30-year mortgage rate.
The affordability vice: prices (Case-Shiller, left) against the cost of financing them (30-year fixed, right). The 2022 anomaly — rates doubling while prices barely dipped — came from rate lock-in: nobody sells a 3% mortgage to buy a 7% one, so supply vanished alongside demand.
For the macro picture, shelter is the stickiest large component of CPI, so this chart feeds the inflation chart with a ~12-month lag. Falling rates with resilient prices re-ignites the wealth effect; falling prices would be the deflationary tail risk.
Bank Loans
Consumer, business, and real-estate loans at US commercial banks.
Credit creation is the economy's private money supply — most money is born as bank loans. Expanding credit is expansionary regardless of what the Fed does; contracting credit (rare — 2009, briefly 2023) is the true crunch signal.
Composition matters: business lending leads investment cycles, consumer credit tracks household stress (watch it accelerate late-cycle as savings run out), and real-estate lending is the slow giant that broke in 2008.
Financial Conditions (NFCI)
The Chicago Fed's National Financial Conditions Index — one number for how tight money is.
The NFCI compresses 105 indicators of risk, credit, and leverage into one weekly number: positive = tighter than average, negative = looser. It's the closest thing to a single dial for "is the financial system easy or stressed?"
Spikes mark every crisis — 2008 dominating, March 2020 second. For crypto, the regime reading matters most: risk assets rally when conditions loosen (NFCI falling), and the index loosening during 2023's Fed tightening explained that year's "impossible" rally.
Bear Markets & Quantitative Tightening
Bitcoin against the Fed's balance sheet, with Quantitative Tightening episodes marked.
Quantitative Tightening (QT) is the Federal Reserve shrinking its balance sheet — draining the liquidity that QE injected. The blue line is the Fed's total assets (FRED series WALCL); the markers flag when each QT episode started and ended. Bitcoin, the most liquidity-sensitive large asset in existence, has lived and died by this line.
The pattern this chart is named for: both of Bitcoin's deepest modern bears happened during QT — the 2018 bear during QT1 (ended August 2019) and the 2022 bear during QT2 — and the endings of QT have historically marked the transition back to easier conditions that bull markets grew out of.
The current setup is why this chart matters now: the balance sheet stopped shrinking around late 2025 and has begun ticking up — QT2 is effectively over — while BTC sits deep in a drawdown. If the 2019 rhyme holds, this is the part of the cycle where liquidity stops being a headwind. A rhyme, not a law.