Methodology

The point of this site is the mechanism: new money first, higher prices later. The charts are there to make that visible. They are not a trading terminal.

These charts are snapshots

Euro-area M3 on the homepage is a dated snapshot compiled from an ECB SDMX pull and committed as data/m3.json. Euro-area purchasing power is a dated snapshot compiled from a Eurostat HICP pull and committed as data/hicp-ea.json. Country purchasing-power series use the same committed HICP snapshot method, stored as data/hicp-countries.json. None of this is a live feed, and we do not write “Updated monthly”.

Money supply (M3)

M3 on the homepage is compiled from an ECB SDMX pull at snapshot time, committed as data/m3.json, not queried live in the browser from the ECB on every visit. The series is euro-area M3, working-day and seasonally adjusted outstanding amounts (BSI). Annual points are December stocks; an open year uses the latest published month. Monthly bars are financial transactions (flows), which are not the same as the change in the stock. M3 growing faster than the real economy is the pressure. It is not the same number as HICP inflation, and it does not hit every price at once. That lag is the Cantillon story on the homepage.

Purchasing power

Euro-area and country purchasing power are from a committed Eurostat HICP snapshot (annual average of the monthly all-items index, 2015=100, unit I15); 2026 is year-to-date of published months (this snapshot: January–July), not live. The country file is data/hicp-countries.json (AT, BE, DE, DK, EL, ES, FI, FR, HU, IE, IT, NL, PL, PT, RO, SE). Greece is EL, not GR. Same dataflow and method as the euro-area file. HICP is the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices, not every national CPI. Housing owned-outright is treated differently across HICP and some national CPIs. Treat the last point as “about this much”, not a precise satoshi.

What €100 still buys uses that series’ 2026 pp as the 2026 bar width. The till card is 100 × (2026 hicpAvg / 2015 hicpAvg) from the same row. The payslip hidden-tax line is amount × (1 − pp/100). The countries index ranking reads the same JSON at runtime. The calculator uses the same committed HICP method. Country pages also draw a euro-area 2026 bar from data/hicp-ea.json (annual 2026 pp) at runtime, same snapshot method, not a live feed. If that file misses, the country bars still render.

Stacking planner

The stacking planner uses the same committed HICP purchasing-power series as the calculator. Each calendar year adds 12 × the monthly cash amount (no interest). That year’s contribution is marked to start-year goods with PP[year] / PP[start]. Applying the end-year index to the whole pile would treat late deposits as if they had sat the full span. An optional sats/month field is a unit count (monthly × 12 × years), not a euro value and not a Bitcoin price. 2026 is year-to-date of published months. Not financial advice.

Debt figures

Public-debt ratios and levels are from the latest national or Eurostat releases we had when the page was written. They move. If a tile says ~63.5% of GDP, the tilde is doing work.

What this is not

If you catch a stale figure, the honest fix is to date it or replace it, not to hide the uncertainty.