World Ransom Index

It occurred to me yesterday, while contemplating my copy of Mad Scientist Magazine (which at the moment is just an excuse to play around with New Scientist covers in Photoshop), that your average evil genius, working late in his underground lab, can find himself a little out of touch with world financial affairs. Let's face it, it's a long haul from setting up your first lair (probably an industrial unit downtown somewhere) to actually being able to patch into the World Leader's Exclusive Telephone Service and dictate terms. So I propose an economic index which would take care of this by being an up-to-date estimate of the exact amount for which the world can be held to ransom.

This should be unnecessarily complicated, and with several obvious flaws - that way it should attract evil genii like catnip. Obviously it will have to take into account the various stock market indices, world gold reserves, etc., but also the number of people at any one time able to threaten the world (i.e. how scarce the product is), how close we all are to mutual destruction through (for example) global warming, how long it is since the Russian Army were last paid, the price of a Big Mac in Bengal, and the current price of spandex on the open market.
(no reason really - I just like to say 'spandex', it's such a great word).

Stick all this on a constantly-updating website, and then evil geniuses can log in at their leisure and demand just enough to persuade the World to cough up, and to avoid having some idiot with good hair rushing in at the last minute and blowing up their extremely expensive hideout, ruining a lifetime's painstaking work.

(Closely related to Neal Stephenson's 'f*ck you money' - and Dr. Evil's Dilemma, obviously)

edit: just thought - this would also be very useful in allocating funds to global projects - for example if it is more expensive to save the world from global warming than to just forget it and buy a new one.