Recently, I started thinking about something pretty crazy: what would happen if we distributed all the cash in the world equally among every person on the planet? I mean everything, from the cash in pockets to liquid bank deposits. A farmer in Wisconsin, a potter in New Delhi, a goat herder in Namibia, and a dentist in Sydney would all receive exactly the same amount. Sounds utopian, right?

Well, it's not as far-fetched as it sounds. There is an economic term for this accessible money: the money supply M2. Basically, it’s all the money you could have relatively quickly, including cash in circulation, high-liquidity bank deposits, savings accounts, and money market deposits. It doesn’t include properties or stocks, just real money.

According to CEIC data, the amount of money in the world in the form of M2 totals around $123.3 trillion in 2024. Now, if we divide that amount by the current global population of 8.16B people, each person would receive approximately $15,108. In euros, that’s about €13,944. Basically, what it costs to buy a Dacia Sandero without extras, or two years of average home purchases.

What’s interesting is that in Spain, the math changes quite a bit. With an M2 money supply of $1.648 trillion and 49 million inhabitants, each Spaniard would receive about $33,571, nearly €31,000 at the exchange rate. More than double the global average. This reflects that Europe has a much higher liquidity concentration than the global average.

Of course, this is just a mental exercise. The reality is that wealth isn’t just cash. According to UBS, global private net wealth reaches $487.9 trillion, including properties, assets, and everything else. But the exercise makes you think about how much money actually exists in the world and how it’s distributed. Quite revealing when you think about it.