Honestly, when you start to understand how much money there really is in the world, your head spins. It all depends on how you count. If you just consider physical cash, meaning banknotes and coins in circulation, it’s about 40 trillion dollars. Sounds like a huge amount of money, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you add bank deposits and demand accounts that people can quickly withdraw, the number jumps to 80 trillion. And when we start counting savings, investments, and other liquid assets, the amount of money in the world becomes a completely different number — around 100 to 130 trillion dollars.

But the most interesting part begins when we look at the entire spectrum of financial assets. Stocks, bonds, futures, various complex derivatives — that’s a whole different scale. If you count all of this together, the total amount of money in financial assets reaches 400 to 500 trillion. And if you include all these exotic instruments and derivatives, the nominal value can even go into the quadrillions.

These figures constantly change due to market fluctuations, central banks printing money, inflation, and other factors. Interestingly, cryptocurrencies, which many people recently considered a completely unreal asset, are already approaching one-third of this global money volume. That’s the transformation of the market.