Once I wondered: how much money is there in the world per person if we simply divide it equally? It sounds like science fiction, but let’s figure it out.

Imagine this. A farmer from Wisconsin, a potter in New Delhi, a herder in Namibia, and a dentist in Sydney—all of them would receive the same amount of cash. How much would that be? The answer is simple and a little funny: enough for each to buy a Dacia Sandero.

The key is how we count money. When we talk about how much money there really is in the world, we mean the monetary aggregate M2. It’s not just coins and bills in wallets—it's the money in circulation plus bank deposits, savings accounts, and other liquid assets that can be relatively quickly converted into cash. M2 does not include real estate or securities; it’s only what can be obtained fairly quickly.

According to CEIC data for 2024, the global money supply M2 was $123.3 trillion. It sounds like an astronomical figure, but when divided by 8.16 billion people, it comes out to about $15,000 per person. Or roughly €14,000. That’s enough for two years of an average family budget, a used car, or that very new Dacia Sandero without any extras.

By the way, it’s interesting to compare the global picture with individual countries. Let’s take Spain. At the end of 2024, Spain’s M2 was about $1.65 trillion, with a population of 49 million. That means each Spaniard would get about $33,500. Almost twice the global average. That’s already serious money.

What does this tell us? That the amount of money in the world on paper is very different from how it’s actually distributed in practice. Wealth concentration by region is enormous. UBS, in its 2024 global wealth report, stated that total private wealth was nearly $488 trillion—that includes real estate, investments, stocks. But that’s a whole other story.

In short, here’s the math. If the total amount of money in the world were simply taken and evenly distributed, everyone would get enough to buy a car and live for a while. But reality is much more complicated, and money is distributed extremely unevenly.