Money Printer Go Brrr is an internet meme that mocks central banks for creating money on a large scale. In its best-known form, a cartoon figure stands at a printing machine pumping out dollars while a crying figure complains about the damage, and the printer answers only with the noise "brrr". The joke is that the central bank can solve almost any short-term problem by making more money.
The meme appeared in March 2020, as markets crashed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US Federal Reserve announced emergency measures. It became a favourite of bitcoin investors, who use it to contrast an unlimited supply of dollars with bitcoin's fixed 21 million coin cap. It is informal slang, and it simplifies how modern money creation actually works.
Money Printer Go Brrr in plain terms
Think of a board game in which the bank can print as many notes as it likes. When players run short, the bank simply hands out more. Nobody goes broke, but over time each note buys less, because there is more money chasing the same houses and hotels on the board.
The meme makes that complaint in a single picture. Fans of the joke argue that money created this way quietly lowers the value of savings. Supporters of central bank action reply that, in a crisis, not acting can do more harm. The meme takes the first side, loudly.
Origin of the meme
The meme circulated in early March 2020 in the "Wojak" cartoon style, with Know Your Meme tracing an early video version titled "Money Printer Go Brrr" to Reddit. It took off as central banks responded to the pandemic shock. On 15 March 2020 the Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate to a range of 0 to 0.25%, a return to the zero interest-rate policy used after the 2008 crisis, and announced at least $700 billion of purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. On 23 March 2020 it said it would buy those securities "in the amounts needed" to support markets, which many commentators read as open-ended quantitative easing.
The Fed's balance sheet grew from a little over $4 trillion in early March 2020 to more than $7 trillion by June 2020. The phrase moved from Reddit to financial Twitter, crypto forums and mainstream news coverage.
What the meme gets right and wrong
- Money creation was real. The Fed's purchases created new bank reserves on a very large scale, and broad measures of the money supply such as M2 grew unusually fast in 2020 and 2021.
- It was not literal printing. Quantitative easing creates electronic reserves in exchange for bonds; paper currency is printed only to meet the public's demand for cash.
- Inflation came later, for several reasons. US inflation measured by the consumer price index peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. Economists still debate how much of that came from monetary policy and how much from government spending, supply-chain disruption and energy prices.
The meme in crypto culture
For bitcoin supporters the meme became part of the case for bitcoin as a store of value: if fiat currency can be created without limit, an asset with a fixed issuance schedule and a halving every four years looks attractive. Bitcoin maximalists use it as a slogan, sometimes paired with warnings about hyperinflation.
The meme also became tied to the speculative mood of 2020 and 2021, when low interest rates pushed money into risk-on assets such as growth stocks, crypto and NFTs. When the Fed raised rates sharply in 2022, the same markets fell into what traders called Goblin Town. The meme belongs to the same family of crypto humour as Hey Hey Hey and When Lambo, but it targets central banks rather than fellow traders.