In other words, M3 includes "money" subject to the vagaries of the interbank market. If the 3-month interbank lending market has dried up, what does that mean for your rolling 3-month $150k certificate of deposit? And how about the liquidity of repurchase agreements?

But since M3 is money the Fed doesn't have control over, and largely independent of the Fed's monetary policy instruments, it makes sense that they would want to hide it from view. What makes no sense is that everyone just accepted the Fed's "nothing to see here, move along".

Money supply - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The most common measures are named M0 (narrowest), M1, M2, and M3. In the United States they are defined by the Federal Reserve as follows:

• M0: The total of all physical currency, plus accounts at the central bank that can be exchanged for physical currency.
• M1: M0 - those portions of M0 held as reserves or vault cash + the amount in demand accounts ("checking" or "current" accounts).
• M2: M1 + most savings accounts, money market accounts, and small denomination time deposits (certificates of deposit of under $100,000).
• M3: M2 + all other CDs, deposits of eurodollars and repurchase agreements.

As of March 23, 2006, information regarding M3 will no longer be published by the Federal Reserve, ostensibly because it costs a lot to collect the data but doesn't provide significantly useful data. The other three money supply measures will continue to be provided in detail.

In an effort to reverse this change, Congressman Ron Paul introduced the now expired H.R.4892 on March 7th, 2006, and subsequently sponsored H.R.2754 on June 15th, 2007 which has been referred to the House Committee on Financial Services.