Approximately how much money (in USD) is there in the world?

Answer 1

There are two problems to your question. The first is you haven't defined what type of money you mean. In the United States, money is defined in levels of money. M1 is currency, travellers checks, demand deposits and other checkable deposits. There is 1.37 trillion US dollars in M1 with about 749 billion in currency globally. If you use higher orders of money, such as savings accounts, certificates of deposit and so on, good luck, the Fed stopped publishing the highest orders of money in March 2006. Some countries do not publish their data and some don't know how much exists.

To give you an idea of scale, Prudential Insurance's checking account is 7 billion dollars. Mine is slightly smaller;-)