Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that all the money in the world suddenly decided to divide it evenly among every resident of the planet. A farmer from Kansas would get exactly the same amount as a programmer from Bangalore, an artist from Lisbon, or a teacher from Cape Town. Interesting—how much money would each person get in the world? The short answer sounds amusing: roughly enough to buy yourself a Dacia Sandero. And nothing more.

To figure out this question, you need to understand what exactly counts as money. Economists distinguish several levels of the money supply. When they talk about M2, they mean all the money people can spend relatively quickly—cash in their wallets, deposits in bank accounts, and savings accounts with liquidity of up to two years. This does not include real estate, stocks, or gold. Just money that can be used here and now.

This is fundamentally different from total global wealth. Wealth is everything: homes, land, investments, businesses. Money is only what you can spend right now. And those are very different numbers.

According to economic analysts, in 2024 the world’s M2 money supply was about $123 trillion. That is everything—from American bank accounts to savings in Thailand. The planet’s population in the same year was about 8.16 billion people. If you divided all of that equally, each person would get about $15,000. Or about €13.9 thousand. Enough for two years of spending by an average family, for a used car, or, as we already said, for a new Dacia Sandero without any extra options.

But here’s what’s interesting: in different countries, the amount of money distributed across the world is uneven. Take Spain. There, M2 money supply at the end of 2024 was about $1.65 trillion, with a population of roughly 49 million people. That means each Spaniard would get about $33.5 thousand. That’s more than twice the global average. Spaniards clearly do better at accumulating liquid funds.

That’s the math. Once you start calculating how much money there really is in circulation in the world, you can see why inequality is so high. And why simply redistributing money won’t solve poverty—what’s needed is systemic change, not just numbers in an account.