As announced on December 17, 2020, the Board's Statistical Release H.6, "Money Stock Measures," will recognize savings deposits as a type of transaction account, starting with the publication today. This recognition reflects the Board's action on April 24, 2020, to remove the regulatory distinction between transaction accounts and savings deposits by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This change means that savings deposits have had a similar regulatory definition and the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts reported as "Other checkable deposits" on the H.6 statistical release since the change to Regulation D. Consequently, today's H.6 statistical release combines release items "Savings deposits" and "Other checkable deposits" retroactively back to May 2020 and includes the resulting sum, reported as "Other liquid deposits," in the M1 monetary aggregate. This action increases the M1 monetary aggregate significantly while leaving the M2 monetary aggregate unchanged.
Today's H.6 statistical release also implements a number of streamlining modifications, also previously announced. The H.6 statistical release is now published at a monthly frequency and contains only monthly average data needed to construct the monetary aggregates. Components of the monetary aggregates are reported at a total industry level without a breakdown by banks and thrifts. The release is available at 1:00 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of every month in only one format—HTML.
For more information on the first monthly H.6 statistical release, see the H.6 Technical Q&As. Retroactive updates to transaction accounts and savings deposits data back to May 2020 along with historical data for discontinued release items are available in the "build your own" and preformatted packages associated with the H.6 release in the Download Program (DDP). The DDP for the H.6 statistical release will also contain weekly average, nonseasonally adjusted data for the monetary aggregates and their components. Even though these data have been dropped from the release, the DDP will contain historical weekly average, nonseasonally adjusted data back to 1975 or the early 1980s, depending on the release item, and through the weeks constituting the last month published on the monthly H.6 statistical release.
