Money supply keeps growing in the Philippines — so should you buy assets now?

Does a bigger money supply guarantee that assets rise?

No — and the Philippines is a good place to see both halves of that sentence. Philippine M2 went from 1,706,926 million PHP in December 2001 to 19,865,006 million PHP in July 2026, a multiple of 11.638, while the consumer price index over the same window rose only 2.525× (BSP, PSA). The money did not stay in the shopping basket. That is the strongest version of the argument for not sitting in cash.

The weaker half is the conclusion people usually draw next: therefore buy any asset, immediately. The global record does not support that step. A rising money supply says something about the denominator. It says nothing about which asset ends up holding the value, or when.

Why does the winning asset change when rates change?

Because the cost of money is the price every asset is discounted against. The same US money supply grew through all four regimes below, and gold — the asset most often described as the automatic answer to money printing — behaved completely differently in each.

Read the second row slowly. Over twenty years US M2 more than tripled and gold still lost 57.9% of its nominal price and about 80.6% of its real value (FRED). Paul Volcker took office in August 1979 and the federal funds rate reached a monthly average of 19.10% in June 1981. When cash pays that much, an asset with no yield has to compete against it — and for two decades it did not.

The fourth row is the mirror image: money growth was the slowest of the four periods, and gold multiplied 2.464×. “More money, higher asset prices” would predict the opposite of both rows.

What do the Philippine numbers actually say?

They say cash lost, and that the loss shows up in three separate places.

What is observable right now?

Two things, and only as facts. The FOMC kept its target range at 3.50–3.75% on 29 July 2026, with three participants dissenting in favour of a hike (Federal Reserve). And the most recent Philippine window, December 2021 to July 2026, shows M2 at ×1.345 against CPI at ×1.227 — the same direction as the long run, at a much smaller gap. Neither of these is a signal. They are the current values of the two variables the rest of this note is about.

So is buying earlier still better?

It depends on one number you can look up: what your money costs. If you are deploying savings, the comparison is asset growth against holding peso cash, and the Philippine record above is unambiguous about how cash did. If you are borrowing, the break-even moves up to your loan rate — and the 1980–2000 row shows what happens to an asset when the funding rate is high and stays high for years.

That is the honest form of the question. Not “will assets rise because money grows”, but “does the expected outcome clear the cost of the money I am using, over the period I can actually hold?” The calculators below let you put your own amount, start month and end month into both sides of that comparison rather than accepting a multiple from a headline.

Check what your amount is worth now →