At the end of 2020, about $18 trillion of bonds worldwide carried negative yields: hold them to maturity and the lender got back less than they put in. Several central banks, including the ECB and the Bank of Japan, had adopted negative interest rates to stimulate their economies. Long considered impossible in textbooks, the phenomenon all but vanished when inflation returned from 2022.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.