Here's an interesting thought experiment I recently came across: what if we took all the cash in the world and divided it equally among every person? Imagine—a farmer from Wisconsin, a potter from New Delhi, a goat herder from Namibia, and a dentist from Sydney all receiving exactly the same amount. It sounds like utopia, but let’s do the math and see how much money is actually in circulation worldwide.

It turns out that when people talk about cash on a global scale, they mean the money supply M2. This isn’t just the bills in wallets—it's the total in circulation plus highly liquid bank deposits, savings accounts, and everything that can be relatively quickly converted into cash. According to CEIC data for 2024, how much money is there in the world in this sense? Exactly $123.3 trillion.

Now for the most interesting part. The world’s population in 2024 was approximately 8.16 billion people. If we divide that huge sum equally, each person on the planet would get about $15,108. Or in euros—around €13,944. It doesn’t sound like much, but think about it: that’s enough for two years of average household expenses, a used car, or, as some analysts say, even a new Dacia Sandero without extra options.

Of course, in reality, the amount of money distributed worldwide is far from evenly spread. There’s also global wealth—$487.9 trillion according to UBS’s 2024 report—but that includes real estate, assets, and everything else that’s not so easy to convert into cash. M2 is precisely what can be relatively quickly obtained in hand.

And here’s an interesting fact about Spain. If we apply the same calculation to one country, the picture looks different. In December 2024, the M2 money supply in Spain was $1.648 trillion, and the country’s population was about 49 million people. If distributed equally, each Spaniard would receive $33,571 or roughly €30,968. That means Spain has a higher per capita cash amount—showing how much the flow of money varies across different economies.

A solid thought experiment that shows how much money is actively in circulation worldwide and how it’s distributed across the population. It helps to understand the scale of the global economy and why simply redistributing wealth isn’t so straightforward—because even if you physically gathered all the cash, it wouldn’t solve the problem of uneven asset and capital distribution.