What if Bitcoin wasn’t lagging M2, but actually front-running the liquidity slowdown? ????

For a while, one of the most popular macro charts around Bitcoin was Global M2 shifted forward vs BTC.

The idea was pretty simple: global liquidity moves first, then Bitcoin follows a couple of months later. If you shifted the lines enough, the relationship sometimes looked almost too good.

But seeing how badly the two have diverged recently got me thinking that maybe we were reading the relationship the wrong way around.

M2 isn’t really a forward-looking market price. It’s a measured monetary aggregate. Bitcoin, on the other hand, trades 24/7 and can react to expectations around rates, policy and risk appetite well before those changes fully show up in monetary data.

So maybe BTC wasn’t always just “waiting for M2”.

Maybe Bitcoin was sometimes pricing in a future slowdown in liquidity before M2 actually showed it, and shifting M2 forward made the relationship look more predictive than it really was.

That makes the current divergence pretty interesting.

Instead of asking:

“When will BTC catch up to M2?”

Maybe the better question is:

“What did Bitcoin see that M2 hasn’t shown yet?” ????

Would be interesting to actually test which one tends to lead the other, rather than just finding the lag where the two lines look best together.