An interesting thought experiment: imagine that all the money on the planet were evenly distributed among all its inhabitants. How much money would each person get? The answer might surprise you.

This is not just a philosophical question — it’s a way to understand how the global financial system works. When people talk about how much money actually exists in the world, they’re referring to the M2 money supply. It’s not just the cash in your wallet, but all cash and bank deposits that can be relatively quickly converted into cash.

According to CEIC, the global M2 money supply in 2024 was $123.3 trillion. It sounds like a fantastical number, but when divided by 8.16 billion people, it comes out to roughly $15,000 per person. That’s about €13,900.

What does this mean in reality? With this amount, a farmer from Wisconsin, a potter from India, a herder from Namibia, and a dentist from Australia could buy a used car. Or, more precisely, a Dacia Sandero without additional options. It’s also equivalent to the average household expenditure over two years.

But that’s the global picture. Looking at individual countries, the picture changes. In Spain, for example, the situation looks different. The M2 money supply there was about $1.65 trillion with a population of roughly 49 million. That means a Spaniard would have received $33,500 — more than twice the global average.

It’s important to understand that how much money is circulating in the world is not the same as total wealth. According to UBS, the world’s net private wealth in 2024 was nearly $488 trillion. The difference is that wealth includes real estate, assets, stocks — everything that’s not so easily exchanged for cash. M2 is only the money you can get your hands on relatively quickly.

This calculation shows an interesting thing: if all cash were somehow evenly distributed, even then, the global economy would remain unequal. Because real wealth isn’t just the money in your pocket, but also how you use it.