What M2 counts
The Bank of Russia publishes several money aggregates, each wider than the last. M0 is cash in circulation. M1 adds rouble deposits that can be spent at once, such as current and card accounts. M2 adds fixed-term rouble deposits. All of them belong to Russian residents, companies and households alike. The widest aggregate, M2X, also counts deposits in foreign currency and debt securities issued by banks. The definitions are set out in the methodology note on the central bank's money aggregates page.
M2 is therefore rouble money only. When the rouble weakens, the rouble value of foreign-currency deposits rises, but that moves M2X, not M2. The monitor watches M2 because it isolates the money created and held in roubles, the currency in which the budget pays its bills.
Where the figures come from
For years the central bank published M2 in a long monthly workbook, the M2 series file. That file stopped updating with the figure for April 2025. The monitor logged it as a source going dark rather than carrying the last number forward, and from May 2025 until the reading resumed in June 2026, M2 shows as unknown.
The reading now comes from the bank's monthly money aggregates page, which publishes a preliminary estimate for the latest month. Estimates can be revised when the full data arrive; the monitor records each value with the date it was fetched, so any revision is visible on the indicator page.
The pre-war pace and the trouble line
The monitor reads M2 as a growth rate against the same month a year earlier. Its 100 is 10% a year, a round figure for the pre-war pace: the average of the central bank's monthly year-on-year growth rates over 2015–2021 was 10.2%, and in 2021 alone 10.8%. The anchor is an average of monthly rates, so it will not match a single December-to-December figure for any one year.
Its 0 is 30% a year. That line is a registered judgment, not a measured fact: at that pace, a printing-press explanation would be hard to dismiss. It still would not, by itself, identify why M2 grew. Both numbers were fixed before any reading was scored, and the reasoning is on the methodology page.
How money growth can connect to the budget
When the budget runs a deficit, the gap is normally covered by borrowing and by the reserve fund. A third route runs through the banks. If banks finance purchases of government bonds with central-bank liquidity, including repo borrowing, and the budget spends the proceeds, the payments land in the accounts of companies and households as new money and add to M2. The government's own accounts are not part of M2, so it is the spending, not the bond sale itself, that shows up. Bank lending to companies creates deposits in the same way. The monitor's methodology names one version of this, from 2022: banks pressed into buying bonds at auctions, with the central bank's repo operations behind them. The auctions can then look healthy even though the gap is, in effect, being covered with new money.
That is why the monitor calls M2 the printing-press detector. Borrowing figures can obscure how a deficit is financed; M2 can show a pattern consistent with monetisation, but cannot identify it on its own.
What M2 cannot prove
Money grows for many reasons that have nothing to do with the budget. Households take mortgages, companies borrow to invest, and savers switch between foreign-currency and rouble deposits. A faster M2 reading is consistent with a monetised deficit, but it does not establish one, and the monitor does not attribute any part of the growth to the budget.
The closest official answer comes from the central bank itself. Its monthly release on money aggregates splits the growth of M2X, the widest aggregate, by source: bank claims on companies and households, net claims on the government, which the bank describes as the contribution of budget operations, and net foreign assets. That split covers M2X rather than M2 itself, and the monitor does not score it.
M2 is a class-3 indicator, a rate that policy choices move directly. Like inflation, it can add weight to strain that other readings show, but no class-3 reading ever counts towards a trigger.
Reading it with the other indicators
M2 is most useful next to the numbers whose movements it may help explain. If the budget deficit widens, the liquid reserve fund shrinks and M2 accelerates at the same time, the three together say more than any one of them. If M2 accelerates while the deficit is stable, other sources of money growth still have to be considered; M2 alone cannot choose among them. The next link in the chain, where money growth can reach prices, is covered in the guide to inflation.
The live reading
Below this guide is the latest year-on-year M2 growth rate and its score: 10% a year is 100 and 30% is 0. It changes when the central bank publishes its next monthly estimate.