The Debase Score measures the gap between how fast the money supply is growing and how fast the government says prices are rising. When these two numbers diverge, purchasing power is eroding faster than official reports suggest. The Score captures that hidden erosion in a single, trackable metric.
The formula
At its core, the Debase Score is straightforward:
M2 Growth is the year-over-year change in the Federal Reserve's broadest money supply measure. This tells you how fast new dollars are being created. CPI is the government's official inflation rate, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The difference between these two numbers is the base erosion rate — the purchasing power loss that CPI doesn't account for.
The Gold Signal acts as a confirming indicator. Gold has functioned as a measure of monetary debasement for millennia. When gold is rising, it tends to confirm that the monetary system is pricing in dilution that official statistics haven't yet captured. The gold component refines the Score rather than driving it.
How to read it
A Debase Score of 1.1% means that purchasing power is eroding 1.1 percentage points faster than CPI reports. For someone earning $80,000, that's roughly $880 per year in hidden erosion on top of whatever CPI-measured inflation is already doing to their paycheck.
When the Score rises, the gap between money creation and reported inflation is widening — your dollar is losing value faster than the headlines suggest. When it falls toward zero, official inflation is catching up with monetary reality (which usually means CPI is spiking, not that money printing has stopped).
A Debase Score above zero means the government is creating money faster than it's admitting prices are rising. A Score near zero doesn't mean things are fine — it usually means CPI finally caught up to what was already happening.
Why it matters for your salary
Most salary negotiations and corporate raise pools are benchmarked against CPI. If your company gives "inflation-matching" raises based on CPI of 2.8%, and the real erosion rate (M2) is 3.9%, every employee in the building is falling behind by the Debase Score — 1.1% — every year. Compounded over a career, this is tens of thousands of dollars in lost purchasing power that nobody accounts for.
Use the Salary Purchasing Power Calculator to see exactly how the Debase Score affects your specific salary. Two numbers, ten seconds, and you'll see the gap between what your employer thinks they're paying you and what you're actually receiving in real purchasing power.
Where the data comes from
Every input to the Debase Score traces to a primary source. M2 comes from the Federal Reserve's weekly H.6 release. CPI comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly report. Gold prices come from market data. Bitcoin data comes from CoinGecko and mempool.space. The Score is calculated fresh every morning from verified data — we never estimate, interpolate, or fabricate. Every number in every brief links to its source.
The Debase Brief publishes the Score every weekday morning at 7 AM along with the full data context — M2 analysis, CPI breakdown, sound money signals, and reader lenses that frame the data for your specific financial situation.