An interesting thought experiment: how much money is actually on Earth if we divided it all equally? I imagine a farmer from Wisconsin, a potter from New Delhi, a herder in Namibia — all receiving exactly the same amount. It sounds utopian, but let’s do the math.

People often confuse the concepts of wealth and the money supply. When they say how much money is on Earth, they usually mean everything that exists — real estate, stocks, assets. But that’s not entirely correct. When talking about actual cash that can be used quickly, we need to look at the monetary aggregate M2. It’s not just paper in your pocket, but also bank deposits, savings accounts — everything that can be converted into cash within a couple of days.

According to CEIC data for 2024, the global money supply M2 was $123.3 trillion. An enormous number, but let’s divide it by the world’s population — approximately 8.16 billion people. That’s about $15,000 per person. Or roughly €14,000. Sounds pretty good, right? That would be enough for a used car or, as jokes go online, a brand-new Dacia Sandero.

This kind of interesting arithmetic comes up when you start calculating how much money is on Earth and how to distribute it fairly. Of course, in reality, it’s much more complicated — money is concentrated in the hands of a few, and most of humanity lives on much smaller sums.

There’s an interesting point: if you do the same calculation for a specific country, the numbers change. Let’s take Spain. At the end of 2024, Spain’s M2 was about $1.65 trillion, with a population of roughly 49 million people. That would mean about $33,500 per Spaniard — almost twice the global average.

So, the question of how much money is on Earth isn’t just a curious calculation. It reflects how unevenly wealth is distributed among countries and continents. Interesting, isn’t it?