Another quiz - how tall is a trillion dollars?

[Oldpinkman]

This is on my home territory as an accountant, ex-IFA and graduate whose degree included reading economics. People get so fazed by numbers outside the ordinary experience. Tiny movements in analogue audio. Huge government defecits.

So, for a virtual pint of beer, how tall is a trillion dollars? Take a $1000 greenback bill, and 999 more of them, and wrap them in a rubber band, and you have a million dollar brick standing 4 inches high. Stack 4 inch bricks on top of each other, how tall is one trillion dollars (the size of the US annual defecit - how much money they have to borrow each year atm to top up their income from taxes to meet their expenditure).

How tall is a trillion dollars? :)

[Barry]

Assuming a trillion is 1000 million, then if $1,000,000 comprises a stack of bills 4" thick, one trillion dollars will made from one thousand stacks. 4,000" = 333' 4" or 111 yards and 4".

[Oldpinkman]

A billion is 1000 million - if, as I fear we must, we use American for this. A trillion is a bit more - at 1000 billion. A little hint. The answer is acceptable to the nearest mile :)

[Barry]

Ah yes - numerical dyslexia on my part! In that case 4,000,000", or 63 miles, 231 yards and 4 inches.

[walpurgis]

Thanks guys, I really needed to know that. :)

[Barry]

You never know - it might come up in a pub quiz.

[Oldpinkman]

And Barry wins the virtual pint. Bit easier if you cross check it in metric - the bricks are 10cm, so 10000cm to a billion, is 100m, and 100m x 1000 gives 100000m or 100km - close enough to 63 miles. Scary isn't it. That pile of $1000 bills goes past the troposphere to where the sky is black!

If we glued them together and the stack toppled over to the South it would go into the English channel past Brighton (about 15% of the dollar bills would get wet)

America owes around $18 trillion right now - increasing by $1 trillion a year. And we worry about Greece going bust? :doh:

[cuddles]

It's all relative though isn't it? Money only has value when someone else has less of it. If we all agreed to wipe all debt away and start from scratch we'd all be happy again - that's what I try to tell my bank manager anyway :lol: I own a part of that bank anyway :scratch:

[Oldpinkman]

It's all relative though isn't it? Money only has value when someone else has less of it. If we all agreed to wipe all debt away and start from scratch we'd all be happy again - that's what I try to tell my bank manager anyway :lol: I own a part of that bank anyway :scratch:

Lend us a couple of hundred thousand euros for a house in france on those terms please :eyebrows: