Net Liquidity Stack

The hypothesis

The "Net Liquidity" framing — credited to Zoltan Pozsar and popularized through 2022–2024 by macro Twitter — argues that when the marginal price-setter for risk assets is the Federal Reserve, only the dollars that escape the two big sterilization sinks (the Treasury General Account and the Overnight Reverse Repo facility) actually pass through to bank reserves and out into the system. Strip those out of the gross balance sheet and you get a single composite that, in some regimes, tracks the S&P 500 better than any other macro variable.

The chart's correlation strip is the honest answer to the obvious question. When it's deep green, the relationship is tight — most of 2022 through mid-2023 lives there. When it fades to ghost or copper, the relationship has broken down, and Net Liquidity is just one of many signals — late 2024 and early 2025 spent stretches there.

What the strip tells you

• ● Green strip — Net Liquidity and the S&P 500 are moving together over the trailing 90 days. Liquidity-driven regimes; QE/QT mechanics dominate.
• ● Ghost strip — relationship is weak. Either earnings, rates expectations, or geopolitics are the marginal driver.
• ● Copper strip — Net Liquidity and the S&P are moving in opposite directions. Often coincides with rate-shock or risk-off episodes.

Sources

Daily timeline starts 2003-02-07; 8478 observations; SP500 overlay begins 2016-04-25. Refreshes hourly via the FRED ingest job.

Read next

• The Treasury Firehose → — where every borrowed dollar is going. The bill-share decisions on that chart are why the TGA leg of this one swings so hard.
• Why the next 10 years are structurally impossible → — the long-form essay that frames Net Liquidity as one piece of the post-2020 dollar regime, not the whole story.