Here's an interesting thought experiment: how much money is there in the world actually? And most importantly — how is it distributed? Imagine for a moment that all the cash in the planet suddenly gathered into one huge pot and was divided equally among all residents. A farmer from Wisconsin would get exactly the same amount as a potter in New Delhi, a shepherd in Namibia, or a dentist in Sydney. It sounds utopian, but the numbers are quite intriguing.

Generally, when people talk about how much money is in the world, they usually mean the monetary aggregate M2 — which is not just cash in your wallet, but a broader concept. It includes currency in circulation, bank deposits with good liquidity, savings accounts. Essentially, these are all the funds you can relatively quickly access. Do not confuse this with total global wealth — that also includes real estate, stocks, jewelry, and everything else that’s hard to convert into cash quickly.

According to CEIC data for 2024, the global money supply M2 was about $123 trillion. It sounds like a cosmic number, but when you start breaking it down, it becomes more interesting. If you take the world’s population at that time — approximately 8.16 billion people — and simply divide the total by the number of people, you get about $15,000 per person. Or roughly €14,000.

What does this mean in reality? Every person on the planet could buy a new Dacia Sandero — that’s a practical result of this mental exercise. Not the most expensive car, but quite a decent one. Or you could spend this money on two years’ worth of expenses for an average household. So, how much money is in the world — it’s not just an abstract number, but a concrete sum that somehow determines the standard of living for each of us.

Interestingly, if you do the same experiment for just one country, the results can be quite different. Take Spain — its M2 money supply at the end of 2024 was about $1.65 trillion, with a population of around 49 million. Dividing evenly, each Spaniard would get about $33,500. That’s roughly twice the global average. This clearly shows how unevenly money is distributed across different countries and regions.

Overall, these calculations help us understand the scale of the global economy and how the monetary system actually works. Of course, in reality, it’s much more complex — inflation, exchange rates, different economic systems. But at least theoretically knowing how much money there is in the world and what it looks like per person is quite useful for a general understanding of the world we live in.