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United States of America , with a wide gap with other countries, is the biggest world economy and contains the richest nation in the world. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US is approximately equal to sum of GDPs of Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia.

Every three month US Federal Reserve evaluates net wealth of three hundred thousands people living in United States. In this evaluation Federal Reserve sum ups all peoples assets and deducts all liabilities. The remaining is the total wealth of Americans. Results of this evaluation is reported in “Flow of Funds” report.

Jun 2008 version of this report shows that net wealth of Americans is 56 trillion US$, 1.7 trillion US$ less than the preceding . To convert this wealth to oil barrel, it can be divided by 135 US$, which is average price of a oil barrel nowadays. The result will be 410 billion barrels. So, the total wealth of Americans is about 410 billion barrels of crude oil. At the first look it seems too much but this is just oil reserves of two middle east countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Latest investigations shows that total oil reserves of Iran and Saudi Arabia are about 136 and 264 billion barrels, respectively.

In 1970, according to “Flow of Funds” report of that year, net wealth of Americans was 4.3 trillion US$. Considering oil price of 18.1 US$/barrel, 1.1 trillion oil barrel was needed to buy all American wealths at that period of time. That mean all available oil reserves at that moment was not sufficient for buying all Americans wealth. So, during the last 38 years, and specially after 2000 when George W Bush became the president of unities states, peoples in Iran and Saudi Arabia became much more wealthier than Americans. Following figures shows changes in American wealth based on number of crude oil barrels.

P.S: This article is a free translation of this article, which has been presented in www.shahirblog.com