Rhianne |
02-08-2012 05:23 PM |
From 'How Stuff Works'.
"How much cash is there in U.S. currency?" If you took all the bills and coins floating around today and added them all up, how much money would you have? All of that hard and easily liquidated currency is known as the M0 money supply. This includes the bills and coins in people's pockets and mattresses, the money on hand in bank vaults and all of the deposits those banks have at reserve banks [source: Hamilton]. According to the Federal Reserve, there was $908.6 billion in the M0 supply stream as of July 2009 [source: Federal Reserve]. That sounds like an incredible amount, but think about it this way: According to the CIA, there were 307,212,123 Americans alive that month [source: CIA]. If you took all the cash and divided it up equally, each person should have about $3,000 in cash on them (or stuffed under the mattress). Obviously, there's some money missing, but there's an easy explanation for that: The Federal Reserve says that at any given time, between one-half and two-thirds of the M0 money stock of U.S. dollars is held overseas [source: Federal Reserve].
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