I just read something that made me think: have you ever wondered how much money actually exists in the world and how it would be distributed if we divided it among everyone?

The question is more interesting than it seems. We're not talking about total wealth (which includes houses, businesses, stocks), but specifically about the cash circulating in money markets. Economists call it the money supply M2, and basically, it’s all the money you could have in your pocket or in a bank account with quick access.

According to data from CEIC, the global money supply M2 in 2024 was around 123.3 trillion dollars. It sounds like an astronomical number, but wait to see what happens when we divide it among the 8.16B people on the planet.

The result is surprisingly modest: each person would receive about 15,108 dollars, or roughly 13,944 euros. Basically, with that amount, you could buy a decent used car, cover two years of average home purchases, or according to some calculations, a new Dacia Sandero. Nothing extraordinary, right? This shows the gap between what we believe exists as liquid money in the world and reality.

What’s interesting is that when you do the same exercise just with Spain, the numbers look better. Spain’s M2 money supply in December 2024 was 1.648 trillion dollars, and with a population of 49 million, each Spaniard would get about 33,571 dollars, almost double the global average. That leaves us with 30,968 euros per person.

This difference is revealing. It shows that the money in the world isn’t distributed evenly, and some countries have much more circulating money per inhabitant than others. Modern economics is complex, and liquid money is only part of the equation. True wealth includes properties, assets, investments, which according to UBS totaled 487.9 trillion dollars globally in 2024.

But thinking about it, this mental exercise is useful to understand how much money is really available in liquid form in the world. It’s not as much as we imagine, and that explains many things about how modern economies work.