Australian money supply · year to June 2026
That's $8,179 every second, and $706.7 million a day, seven days a week.
The scale of it
The Reserve Bank publishes this every month. It just never makes the evening news.
Your share
Nobody hands it to you. It enters the economy through lending and spending long before it reaches your wages, and it competes with your dollars for the same houses, the same groceries, the same everything.
Your piece of the pie
Think of every Australian dollar in existence as one pie, and the money you've saved as your slice of it. Banks create new dollars every day, so the total keeps growing. Your slice doesn't grow with it. The number in your account stays exactly the same, but the pie it's a share of gets bigger and bigger around it.
That's the whole thing. If your money isn't growing at least as fast as the total money supply, your piece of the pie is shrinking, even though you haven't spent a cent. It's the same reason shareholders object when a company issues new shares: more shares exist, so each one owns less of the company.
The pie grows. Australia's money supply rose 7.97% last year. There are simply more dollars in existence than there were.
Your slice doesn't. Wages rose 3.3%. Savings earned less than that after tax. Your slice barely moved.
So your share falls. You own a smaller fraction of everything there is to buy, and the things everyone bids for with new money get further away.
A dollar today holds just 54.1% of the share of the money supply it held ten years ago. Put plainly: your slice is 45.9% thinner than it was in 2016.
This is dilution of the money stock, measured exactly. It isn't the same as a fall in purchasing power, because the economy also produced more over that period. But nothing you were told about inflation accounts for a gap this size.
The gap
Three numbers, all from Australian government sources, all covering roughly the same period.
The money supply grew 4.17 percentage points faster than the official inflation rate, and 4.67 points faster than wages. If your pay rose 3.3% while the money around it grew 7.97%, your slice of the pie got smaller, even though the number on your payslip got bigger.
1977 – 2026
This is every Australian dollar in existence, going back to 1977. Back then there were $55 billion of them. Today there are $3.5 trillion. The marked points show the moment each new trillion arrived.
How long each trillion took
The Australian dollar was introduced in February 1966. It took 41.6 years to create the first trillion of them, reached in September 2007. The second trillion took 9.6 years. The third took 6.9 years. Each one is arriving in roughly two thirds the time of the one before it, which is what compounding looks like from the inside.
More Australian dollars in existence than twenty years ago.
More than thirty years ago, in 1996.
More than in 1977, when the money supply was $55 billion.
Money vs housing
Here is the money supply per person and the price of a house, both starting at 1× in 1977. If new money had nothing to do with house prices, these two lines would have no reason to travel together. They travel together.
Between 1977 and 2024, the latest full CPI reading available, the official consumer price basket rose just 6.9×. Houses rose four times faster than the inflation figure, and almost exactly as fast as the money created per Australian. A house didn't become four times more of a house. There are simply far more dollars chasing it.
Per person matters here. The money supply is a national total and the population has almost doubled since 1977, so comparing the raw total to the price of a single house would overstate the case. Divided by population, the comparison is like for like.
Where does it come from?
There's a common belief that new money comes from a government printing press. Overwhelmingly, it doesn't. The vast majority of new money is created by commercial banks when they issue loans.
When a bank approves a mortgage, it doesn't lend out someone else's savings. It credits the borrower's account with a new deposit, and that deposit is new money that did not exist a moment earlier. This isn't a fringe theory: it's the mainstream description published by the Bank of England and explained by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Which is why the money supply and house prices tend to move together. New money enters the economy at the point of borrowing, and in Australia most borrowing is against property. The people closest to newly created money get to spend it first, at yesterday's prices. Everyone else meets it later, as higher prices.
That's the part the headline inflation figure doesn't capture. CPI measures a basket of consumer goods. It does not measure the price of the assets that new money flows into first, and it is those assets, above all housing, that have moved furthest out of reach.
Straight answers
This argument is stronger when it's honest. So here are the caveats, stated plainly.
No, and this page doesn't claim it is. Money supply growth and consumer price inflation are two different measurements. Some of that new money is matched by real growth in goods and services, and some flows into assets rather than shopping baskets. What the 7.97% figure does show is the rate at which the number of Australian dollars is expanding, which is a real and rarely reported fact about your currency. The gap between the two numbers is where the argument lives.
Yes. A growing economy with a growing population needs a growing money supply, otherwise you get deflation, which brings its own serious problems. Australia's population grew about 1.5% last year and the economy produced about 2.6% more. Neither of those is anywhere near 8%. The question this page raises isn't whether money should grow, but whether roughly 8% a year, year after year, for decades, is being honestly reflected in a headline figure of 3.8%.
No, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The money supply is measured and published monthly by the RBA, not by the second. The counter projects forward at the average rate actually measured over the past twelve months. Money creation is lumpy in reality, so the average is the honest way to show it.
Not fake, but narrow. The ABS measures what it says it measures: a basket of household consumer goods and services, competently and transparently. The criticism isn't that the number is falsified. It's that a single consumer-basket figure gets reported as though it captures the full cost of living, when the largest cost most Australians face (the price of a home) sits largely outside it.
Please do. Every figure on this page comes from the RBA, the ABS, or the Bank for International Settlements, and all of them are linked at the bottom. The money supply figures are in the RBA's Statistical Table D3, column "Broad money". It's a public spreadsheet, and it takes about two minutes to verify.