Here's an interesting question I recently came across: how much money in the world would each person have if everything were divided equally? It sounds like a riddle, but the answer turns out to be quite specific.

Imagine for a second such a scenario — all the cash in the planet's circulation evenly distributed among all people. Then a farmer from Wisconsin, a potter from New Delhi, a herder in Namibia, and a dentist in Sydney would all receive the same amount. It sounds utopian, but the math checks out.

It turns out that the amount of money actually in circulation worldwide is not exactly the same as total wealth. Economists usually refer to the money supply M2, which includes cash in circulation, highly liquid bank deposits, savings accounts, and other assets that can be relatively quickly converted into cash. Essentially, these are all the funds you could access within a few weeks or months.

According to CEIC data for 2024, the global money supply is approximately $123.3 trillion. That’s an enormous number, but when you divide it by the world population — about 8.16 billion people — it results in an interesting figure. Each inhabitant of Earth would get roughly $15,000. Or about €14,000 at the current exchange rate.

For comparison: that’s roughly the cost of a used car, or the expenses of an average household over two years, or even a new Dacia Sandero in the base configuration. Not bad if such a distribution were possible, right?

For reference, the total private wealth worldwide, according to UBS, already amounts to $487.9 trillion — including real estate, assets, investments, and other holdings that are more difficult to quickly convert into cash.

Interestingly, if you do the same calculation for individual countries, the figures vary. For example, in Spain, the M2 money supply is about $1.65 trillion with a population of roughly 49 million. That means each Spaniard would get about $33,500 — nearly two and a half times more than the average global resident. This shows how unevenly financial resources are distributed among countries.

In general, the question of how much money there is per capita in the world vividly demonstrates the scale of the global economy and its disparities. But that’s a whole other story.