A cynic, Oscar Wilde famously quipped, knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” 

Well, we live in an age of unprecedented cynicism, so it behooves us to be able to answer: what is the price of everything? How much money is there in the world, if you add it all up? And is it really the measure that we should be concerned about?

How much cash is there in the world?

Ask somebody what “money” is, and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll just pull out a wad of notes and hold one up to show you. Now, that might seem like a laughably simple interpretation of the question, but it’s a legit economic measure, at least in some countries like the UK.

“M0 is the narrowest definition of money supply in common use,” notes moneyterms.co.uk. “[It] is also known as the monetary base.”

“The definition used in the UK is bank notes and coins in circulation, plus banks’ deposits with the Bank of England,” it explains.

So, how much cash money actually is out there, in people’s wallets, coin purses, and hoarded down the back of countless sofas? Well, it’s a difficult question to answer – but probably not for the reason you might expect.

“There is about £84 billion (or 84,000,000,000) of British money out there in coins and notes. There’s also US$2,236 billion in US money, €1,578 billion in the money of the European Union and ¥9,616 billion in Chinese money – plus money in many other currencies,” wrote Renaud Foucart, a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Lancaster University, in a January 2024 article for The Conversation.

Now, almost a year has passed since then, so today’s figures are slightly different – as of September 2024, the UK apparently has around £96.5 billion in M0 money floating around, while the US’s figure is $5,588 billion, the EU’s is €4,792 million, and China has ¥12,183 billion. 

So, we’re already beginning to see part of the problem with counting all the money in the world: how quickly the figures change. But when we try to combine all those figures, things get even more tricksy: “As money is not the same in every country, summing up all the coins and notes in the world means that you need to measure how much a US dollar, an Indian rupee, or a Chinese yuan is worth in Great British pounds,” Foucart explained. 

“If this is done with the latest available data, then added up, you will find a total of £6,113 billion,” he said. But: “This amount could change very quickly and is probably already outdated at the moment you read this article.”

How much money is there in the world?

Of course, if the only money we had was in our pockets, we’d all be pretty badly off (or else our trousers would constantly be falling down from the weight of all the coins) – so maybe there’s a more reasonable definition of “money” that we should be using instead.

If we move up from M0 to M1, we get to include not just money in circulation right now, but also the money in bank accounts – at least, that portion of it that can be quickly converted into usable cash. 

“M1 is defined as the sum of all currency in circulation, plus the value of most liquid deposits at commercial banks, except those held by the government, foreign banks, or other depository institutions,” explains Investopedia. “[It] is a measure of all the most liquid forms of money in an economy.”

It’s also, frankly, quite a lot larger than M0. “In the UK, around 96 percent of money exists only in electronic form,” Foucart pointed out. “When you include that, the total is not £84 billion but £2,223 billion.”

As of September, that number is slightly lower – around £2,199 billion – but it’s still clear that the majority of money in the UK at least is held in electronic, rather than tangible, funds. The same is true in the US, where M1 supply was $18,151 billion in the same month, and the EU, where the figure was around €10,398 million.

So, converting to a single currency and adding it all up, what do you get? Well, again, bear in mind that it’s from January, but “if you add up again the figures available for the entire world – money in coins and notes, plus electronic money in bank accounts – you get roughly £46,557 billion,” Foucart wrote.

How much material wealth is there in the world?

In 2019, Elon Musk – already one of the richest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of $22.3 billion – was being sued. Vernon Unsworth, the plaintiff, was seeking $190 million in damages – but there was a problem. “Some people think I have a lot of cash,” Musk reportedly said on the stand. “I actually don’t.”

Now, that might sound like a blatant lie, but it’s kind of not. While Musk is unlikely to ever wonder where his next meal is coming from, he is, like many billionaires, rather cash-poor compared to his net worth figure. So, how does that work?

“Many things that are worth a lot are not money itself,” Foucart pointed out. “Very rich people keep only a little part of their fortune in cash. They prefer to also own things like businesses that are likely to make them even richer.”

So let’s take one of the broadest measures of money available. “Including bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, plus above-ground gold supply, and funds invested in various financial products like derivatives, the amount is in the quadrillions,” wrote Sue Chang at MarketWatch back in 2017.

“Funds invested in derivatives alone total at minimum $544 trillion, and the high-end estimate is $1.2 quadrillion,” Chang noted. “In fact, there is more money in derivatives than in all the stock markets combined, which is a comparatively paltry $73 trillion.”

Then there’s things like real estate, valuable resources, inherited wealth, products bought and sold… the list goes on. And totting up the value of all these things is pretty difficult: “you don’t want to double count anything,” Foucart explained. “If farmers sell the milk of their cows to a cheese maker, who then sells cheese to a shop, which sells it to people, all the value – the milk, the cheese and the people selling it, is contained in what you pay at the shop: the final sale.”

Sum it all up though, and you get the world GDP – which, for 2023, came out at $105.44 trillion. With a T. To put that in perspective: if you could somehow convert all of that into one-dollar bills, you could pile them up on top of each other and they’d reach the Moon… 30 times over.

The worth of the world

Evidently, then, there is a lot of money sloshing around on the planet. But to what extent should we, you know… care?

“Sometimes, things that have value cannot easily be turned into money,” Foucart pointed out. “Imagine that you own a beautiful forest, with a nice clean river to swim in during the summer, and some very rare birds and old trees. And underneath that forest, there is a lot of oil.”

“By owning this forest, you are very wealthy,” he wrote. “But once you decide to turn your wealth into a lot of money, you will need to destroy the forest: cut down the trees for wood to sell, and drill into the earth to get the oil out.”

It’s a familiar story, with what are rapidly becoming worrying consequences. The oil trade has led to some of the worst environmental disasters in the world; the Amazon rainforest is being sacrificed in the pursuit of profit; meanwhile fracking is not just screwing up the environment, it may also be giving kids cancer. Crypto mining – possibly the most literal kind of “wealth creation” there is – produces the same pollution as 3.5 million gasoline-powered cars in the US alone.

With that in mind, perhaps we should concentrate on other metrics of wealth. “People might have enjoyed spending time with friends walking in the forest, or paddling in the rivers,” Foucart wrote. “This has value, and it is lost when the forest is gone. And the wealth you held by owning the forest is gone too.”

“If we want the money we use to still be worth something in the future, we sometimes need to restrain from destroying what we own to get cash today,” he concluded.