How much is that?

Ever wondered how much money was being spent on the current financial crisis? Ever wondered how long it would take to pay it back?

“There are 86,400 seconds in. . . . . one day.
1 million seconds in. . . . . . . . . 11.5 days.
1 billion seconds in. . . . . . . . . 31.5 years.
1 trillion seconds in. . . . . . . . .31,500 years.
The next time you read in the papers something about a trillion dollars, consider that that number represents a-dollar-a-second for 31,500 years, from the age of mastodons and woolley mammoths all the way down to the present!”
^{1 War = 1 Trillion Dollars - How Much Is That? - AfterDowningStreet.org}

Lets take a look at how much that is and break it down.

In the US, the highest dollar note in common circulation is the $100 bill. They’re often referred to in pop-culture as Benjamins or Bens. I think you can see why.

This is an image of an American $100 bill

So if we take that $100 and we put it in a stack with 99 others, we get a $10,000 stack thats less than 1/2 an inch thick and would easily fit in your pocket or wallet without too much problem. I had a wallet that thick with receipts when I used to carry a wallet. It looks something like this.

A stack of $10000

So now, lets consider. 100, 10000, 1000000. While still relatively small, and easily fitting in a briefcase or even a normal backpack, a million dollars is a little more substantial. You could probably walk the streets with it in your bag without anyone realising just how much money you had on you. If you had the balls that is. So we’ll take 100 of those $10,000 stacks to create $1,000,000.

A pile of $1,000,000

Bah, chicken feed. People can make that in a day without even lifting a finger now days. Its nothing. Lets up the ante. We’ll take 100 of those little piles and creat ourselves $100,000,000. Now we’re getting somewhere. You need a fork-hoist of some kind to move this around. A stack of $100,000,000 in $100 bills would fit onto a normal shipping pallet quite nicely.

A pallet of $100,000,000

But the current credit crisis and the meltdown of the economy is being talked of in numbers far bigger than that. Individual banks and companies are receiving money in the Billions of dollars. If you need a pallet for $100,000,000, how much space would a billion dollars take up? Lets see.

Pallets totalling $1,000,000,000

You couldn’t swim in it, but even Scrooge McDuck would start to drool at this point. But Mr McDuck always managed to swim in his money.

So this financial crisis, the global recession, the economic collapse of millions of companies around the world, is costing Trillions of dollars. Not billions. We’re seeing promises of $3 trillion going into the US economy and then another trillion or more being promised to the International Monetary Fund. What does a trillion dollars actually look like? Can you swim in it?

1 Trillion Dollars in $100 bills

That is pallets of $100,000,000 stacked 2 high, 50 wide and 100 deep.

The above images came from What does one TRILLION dollars look like? on Pagetutor.com.

So lets consider that globally you see numbers of $7 trillion and more being wiped out of existence. So that means that if we spent $1 every second, it would take 220,500 years to spend that much money. That means that in the first decade of the 21st Century, we have destroyed as much money as if we’d been spending $1 a second since the stone age when homo sapiens first started to appear in Africa.

And that doesn’t even count the amount being spent by nations around the world on the large wars.

It really makes you wonder… With US debt already spiralling out of control, just how bad will things be in 4 years time?