MoneySupply: The new world economy in four charts

We all know the world economy is changing. We know it is changing fast. But do we really know how fast? Read on.

In the spring, the International Comparison Programme calculated new exchanges rates for comparing output of different economies. At the time it suggested that China was the world’s largest economy because money went significantly further in China than previously thought. To get this inference, you had to do a bit of extrapolation from the 2011 base year.

Now it is official. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund estimates the size of the US economy was $17.4tr and the size of China’s economy was $17.6tr as in the chart below.