Here's the question that has been bothering me for a long time: how much money is there in the world if we just took it and divided it equally among everyone? It sounds like utopia, but let's check the numbers.

Imagine this: a farmer from Wisconsin, a craftsman from Delhi, a herder from Namibia, and a doctor from Sydney suddenly receive exactly the same amount of cash. Impossible? Yes. But the numbers are interesting.

To understand how much money is actually circulating in the global economy, we need to look at the money supply M2. This is not all global capital or real estate — it’s the money that’s in circulation, on bank accounts, in savings deposits accessible within two years. Essentially, these are all the funds that can be relatively quickly converted into cash.

According to CEIC data for 2024, the global money supply M2 is approximately $123.3 trillion. It sounds like an astronomical figure, but wait. The world’s population in the same period is about 8.16 billion people. If we divide these trillions among the number of people, each inhabitant of the planet would get about $15,108.

What can you buy with this money? According to calculations, it’s roughly a two-year budget for an average household, or a used car, or, as the internet likes to say, a Dacia Sandero. Not the most impressive sum for global redistribution, right?

For comparison, let’s look at Spain. There, the money supply M2 at the end of 2024 was about $1.648 trillion with a population of 49 million people. The result? Each Spaniard would get about $33,571 — roughly twice the global average. Interestingly, the Spanish economy seems to handle the money supply per capita better.

Of course, all this is a theoretical exercise. Actual wealth, according to UBS, amounts to $487.9 trillion — counting assets and real estate. But it’s in the money supply M2 that we see the part of the economy that truly works, circulates, and lives. And when you understand how much money there really is in the world, it becomes clear why its distribution is so unequal. Numbers are just numbers, but the system is much more complex.