Most of the money in the world isn't something you can touch. Only 10% is physical cash; the rest is just "invisible" data sitting inside powerful bank computers!
If you imagined all the money in the world as a giant mountain of gold coins or stacks of dollar bills, you would be 90% wrong. In the modern world, money has evolved from physical objects into digital information.
Think about how people get paid today. Your boss doesn't hand you an envelope full of cash; they send a digital signal to your bank. When you buy something online, no physical coins move from your house to the store.
Most people think only governments "print" money. While they do print the physical bills, private banks actually create much of the digital money through loans. When a bank gives someone a mortgage, they don't give them a bag of cash; they simply type numbers into a computer account. Suddenly, "new" money exists that wasn't there before.
The system relies on trust. As long as we believe those digital numbers can be exchanged for goods or services, the system functions. If everyone in the world tried to withdraw their cash at the exact same time (a "bank run"), the banks would quickly run out of paper bills because 90% of that wealth isn't physically there!
Money today is less like a "thing" and more like a "score" in a video game. It's a massive digital ledger that keeps track of who owes what to whom, stored safely in the world's most secure computers.
