The US economy continues to work, as do I, as do many other fiat currencies.  That graph shows some number going up...  while hundreds of millions of US citizens continue to work, eat, sleep and buy consumer goods.

The monetary base is highly liquid money that consists of coins, paper money (both as bank vault cash and as currency circulating in the public), and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank.

The monetary base is called high-powered because an increase in the monetary base (M0) can result in a much larger increase in the supply of bank money, an effect often referred to as the money multiplier. An increase of 1 billion currency units in the monetary base will allow (and often be correlated to) an increase of several billion units of "bank money". This is often discussed in conjunction with fractional-reserve banking banking systems.