See also: Untangling the BIS, the IMF, and the World Bank →
Four numbers that don't normally sit on the same page: what a dollar buys elsewhere, how much money actually exists, who holds the world's reserves, and how big the world's economy and its government debt actually are. Bitcoin's own market cap today is $1,583,772,463,044 — currently #12 on the Asset Board.
Updated 2026-09-11 14:13 UTC
What a US dollar buys in other currencies today — European Central Bank reference rates.
How much money actually exists, by aggregate — narrowest to broadest — across every economy a real, honest, keyless source could be found or confirmed missing for.
Foreign-exchange + SDR + IMF reserve-position holdings, by economy — gold is shown separately, on its own page.
Official-sector gold reserves by country, priced at today's live gold quote.
The world's largest economies by GDP, and each one's government debt as a share of its own GDP.
Three figures, side by side, at the same scale — deliberately NOT summed into one number, because the whole point is the CONTRAST between them. Fiat money supply can be and regularly is expanded by policy choice. Gold's supply grows too, just slowly — new mining adds roughly 1.5% to the above-ground stock in a typical year. Bitcoin's supply is fixed by its own consensus rule at 21 million coins, full stop, growing toward that cap on a published, unchangeable schedule and never past it. (World GDP appears elsewhere on this page, not here — it measures a YEAR of economic output, not a stock of money or value, so mixing it into this particular comparison would answer a different question than the one this chart is asking.)
⚠️ The "Broad money" bar is a sum across different countries' own currencies, converted to dollars at TODAY's exchange rate. That means it moves for two completely different reasons that look identical on this chart: real growth in the money supply, AND swings in the dollar's own exchange rate against the euro. A stronger dollar alone would shrink this bar even if not one additional euro or dollar were ever printed — don't read a change here as evidence of printing without checking the FX rate first.
Exchange rates are the European Central Bank's own daily reference rates, reached through a free keyless proxy (Frankfurter) rather than a third-party estimate — the same rates the IMF itself references when it revalues the Special Drawing Right every five years (see the Ledger's own entry on what the IMF, the BIS and the World Bank each actually do).
Money supply covers 15 economies with real, current, live-queried
figures — the United States (Federal Reserve H.6), the Euro area (European Central Bank),
Canada (Bank of Canada Valet API), Switzerland (SNB Data Portal), Brazil (Banco Central do
Brasil SGS API), the United Kingdom (Bank of England IADB) and Norway (Statistics Norway
StatBank) — not all ~190 IMF members, and coverage per economy is genuinely uneven (Norway
publishes all four aggregates; the US and UK publish only some). That unevenness is a real
limitation, not laziness: a real, hands-on hunt for one templated source that mirrors many
countries' money supply at once (the obvious next step after FRED's own templated reserve-
series mirror worked) found the pattern genuinely exists on FRED (OECD's discontinued Main
Economic Indicators series) — but every country in that family stopped updating years ago
(most in 2023, some back to 2018), so none of it is used here. A further
5 economies (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, South
Africa, Australia, Denmark) were seriously investigated and are shown with blank cells and
their own source-note rather than silently dropped — each hit a real, named obstacle (a
discontinued mirror, an API that requires a registered key, a genuinely live source only
available as a spreadsheet). The Euro area's monetary base ("Base money" in the ECB's own
terminology) is the one figure on
this whole board that is hand-curated rather than live-queried — it genuinely exists and the
ECB states it in plain English every week, but in a different ECB dataset than the one used
for its own M1/M2/M3 (which, unlike M0, ARE reachable the same live keyless way as everything
else here) — see the Money Supply page's own note for the full trail, and
tools/fetch_money_worldwide.py's own dated research log for every economy's
individual story.
Reserves (excl. gold) are curated to the 9 largest holders that a real, live, keyless mirror of IMF's own International Financial Statistics reserve series actually covers — several economies that would belong on this list (the Euro area as a bloc, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore) either have no matching mirror or one that stopped updating years ago, and are left off rather than shown stale.
Gold reserves are a curated, dated list of the 15 largest official holders (World Gold Council, compiled from IMF reporting) — central banks report this quarterly at best, so this is refreshed by hand periodically rather than pulled live every build. It is priced at today's live gold quote (shared with the Asset Board).
Global debt & GDP is the one section pulled directly from an IMF system that actually serves real data — the DataMapper API behind imf.org's own public data visualizations — across essentially every economy the IMF's World Economic Outlook covers. The dollar debt figures are IMPLIED (GDP × the IMF's own published debt-to-GDP ratio), not a separately published dollar series.
Nothing here is investment advice, and none of the institutions named on this page have endorsed it or are affiliated with it.