I was chatting with a friend about the state of the economy, and I brought up how the monetary expansion that began in 2008 wasn’t actually stimulative because the Fed started paying interest on excess reserves. My friend expressed a little skepticism that excess reserves mirrored the monetary expansion one-for-one. But behold:

No, it’s not literally one-for-one, but it’s close. Non-circulating money gives me the vague impression of a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.