Readers Respond On Morris

Here's the gist of the reader comment:

Dick Morris was referring to the Federal Reserve Adjusted Monetary Base which did, in fact, grow by a multiple between 2.5x-3x in the five months spanning October, 2008 through March, 2009. A simple Google search will confirm this.

And the core of Andrew's reply:

I followed your suggestion and looked at the Money Supply page on Wikipedia but could not find the term "adjusted monetary base." I did find "monetary base," which is used in the U.K. to refer to M0. Searching the web on "adjusted monetary base" led me to the St. Louis Fed webpage and the graph that you had pointed to. I pulled out the numbers:

2008-08-13 874.264
2008-08-27 876.001
2008-09-10 873.833
2008-09-24 949.847
2008-10-08 1016.694
2008-10-22 1182.387
2008-11-05 1264.992
2008-11-19 1505.035
2008-12-03 1493.915
2008-12-17 1671.248
2008-12-31 1690.915
2009-01-14 1770.323
2009-01-28 1749.868
2009-02-11 1551.341
2009-02-25 1621.121
2009-03-11 1565.933
2009-03-25 1725.736
2009-04-08 1749.164

I agree that these have grown a lot -- again, I'll defer to the experts in macroeconomics as to whether we should be worried about it -- but I don't see where Morris could've gotten the 271% figure from. His column was published on March 3, so the latest figure he could've been using was the 1621.121 number from Feb 25. Going back five months from there gives the Sep 24 number of 949.847. But 1621.121/949.847 = 1.706718, which is a 71% increase. A huge increase for five months, yes, but only about 1/4 as much of an increase as the claimed 271%.