
What does one trillion dollars look like? - pama
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
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dkersten
Pffft! They're aiming low. I have one hundred and fifty trillion dollars[1]
sitting right here on my desk. A 100 trillion dollar bill and a 50 trillion
dollar bill :)

[1] Admitedly its out-of-circulation zimbabwe dollars that would be worth
maybe $5 if it were still in circulation. Heres what one hundred trillion
dollars looks like:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/Zimbabwe_%2410...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg)

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tehjones
Okay, Lets go for an easier representation of this scale. The author states
that 100 Million dollars fits on a standard pallet. If we take a standard us
pallet[1], we find that within a standard container[2] we can fit 9
pallets[3].

There fore One Trillion Dollars will fit into 1 000 000 000 000 / (9 * 100 000
000) = 1111.111... containers. Lets round up to 1112 for the sake of
transportation convenience.

If we take a large container ship like the COSCO Guangzhou[4] we can see that
it will cary 9450 TEU[5] containers.

As you can see one of these large ships can carry 9450/1112 = 8.499 container
loads of trillion dollars.

From this we can see that I expected a large container ship to carry much
less, so my conclusions is kind of out the window. Damn that is a big ship.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet#ISO_pallets>
[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit>
[3]<http://www.epal-pallets.org/uk/produkte/vergleich.php>
[4]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSCO_Guangzhou>
[5]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit>

~~~
Dove
That's a good thought on how to represent the volume, though. A 1000 TEU ship
is a medium size feeder. A bit of googling around gets me the Logan James,
1055 TEU: <http://smithholdingsgroup.com/Shipping.html>

A trillion dollars fits on a ship of roughly that size.

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gfodor
How many times could you ship the dollars on that ship before you ran out of
money?

~~~
patrickk
If the price of oil was stable it might be possible to answer this....!

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iwwr
There are in fact less than $1tn in circulation as currency. Most of it is in
bank accounts or money titles, depending on your definition of 'money'.

Currency in circulation:
<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CURRENCY>

M1: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1>

M2: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2>

MZM: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MZM>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
That's exactly what I was thinking upon reading the article. When talking
about billions of dollars of deficits or stimuli, it's not cash or even gold
equivalent we're talking about. It's virtual, based on a gentleman's agreement
between banks. Most of the money is created by banks, when people like you and
me come to them for a loan or a mortgage.

So the conclusion of the article is false:

 _"the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"...
[1.5 acres of double-stacked pallets of $100 dollar bills] is what they're
talking about."_

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ck2
So, in perspective, USA gross national product (annual) is $14 trillion, so 14
of those (acres or football fields of pallets would have been a better
reference).

USA annual defense spending is $1.35 trillion (more than every other country
on earth combined). This does not include the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars (hidden in "emergency spending", basically debt sold to China) or the
huge medical expenditures to keep tens of thousands of wounded soldiers alive
for years after.

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revorad
Wow, it must be a slow day on HN...

~~~
Clarity1992
I know exactly what you mean, and most of the time I catch myself thinking
that it's on a weekend. Possible explanations:

1.) The people that post more technical stuff do so from work and don't use HN
as much on weekends.

2.) Everyone is in "weekend mode" and wants to post more fun stuff.

3.) I am in "weekend mode" and my desire to click on fun stuff is biasing my
impression of what is posted.

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CWIZO
Previously discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511285>

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hugh3
I find the most useful way to visualise a trillion dollars (when we're talking
about US Government spending (which is generally the only time we hear about
trillions of dollars) is to just visualise $3,257 in the hands of each of the
307 million people in the United States.

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brk
You'd have to visualize that _quickly_ though. $3200 in the average persons
hands would last about 10 minutes.

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edw519
A billion dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A trillion dollars.

~~~
talbina
This same comment was made a few days ago and it was down voted.

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Confusion
And it should be downvoted now, before we devolve into a community where the
first dozen comments are people being (or most likely: trying to be) funny.

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jarin
I'm not as concerned about what a trillion dollars looks like as I am with
what a hundred million looks like. Once I get the pallet-sized stack, then
trying to do something about the warehouse-sized stack is probably a lot more
realistic.

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jwecker
Pedantic-police: The $1-million little pile there has 10 bundles of $10,000 -
that's not 1 million. (or are my eyes deceiving me?) Don't have the patience
to figure out if that error is propagated to the rest...

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trotsky
You're totally correct. It appears every picture in this article is off by a
large factor.

One million dollars takes up several duffel bags. Here's a picture I found
that I can't verify but HuffPost thinks it's true:

[http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-1MillionDollars....](http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-1MillionDollars.gif)

Even if it's not 100%, it's much closer to that than the size of two shoes.
Here is a picture from the same article of 100 million:

[http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-100MillionCash.j...](http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-100MillionCash.jpg)

~~~
stan_rogers
Not even close. A packet is 100 bills; a packet of $100 bills is ten thousand
dollars. Just a rough count of the front face of what you see in that picture
will tell you that there is either more than a million there, or that the
centre of the main block is hollow. Think of it this way (in a very lossy
fashion): a crisp, new bill is not too very different in thickness from a
premium sheet of inkjet paper. A US bill of current issue is 2.61" by 6.14",
so four of them can be printed on a letter-size page with a lot of trimming
waste (42% waste -- but it's the best packing you can get on letter). A ream
of paper is 500 sheets, so with a whole lot of waste, a pile of paper about
the size of a ream of ordinary office paper is $200,000 dollars. Paper is
ordinarily sold in boxes of ten reams, and if you are familiar with the
standard size box of office paper, well, you are familiar with something that
is 42% bigger than is needed to hold _two_ million dollars in $100 bills.

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InfinityX0
A trillion dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? The willingness to take
on hordes of debt to obsessively work on building something you, and others,
will love.

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itodd
This week on This American Life they are asking "what exactly is money?"

<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/>

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lubos
it would look more impressive vertically stacked... it didn't make me think
that one trillion is particularly huge.

~~~
ck2
Have you ever stood on a football field or acre of land?

Imagine that full of pallets of $100 bills.

To me that's quite a visual, vertical has no spacial reference.

UPDATE: _I did some quick calculations and if my math is right, it's more like
over THREE acres for a single stacked pallet. Double stacked as in the image
would cut it down to just over 1.5 acres._

~~~
burgerbrain
No, I agree. Stacked vertically would have a much more dramatic visual effect,
which is what I assume the author is going for. I remember when I was younger
I saw a diagram of different types of computer storage stacked into piles. I
think it might have been the number of floppies in a CD, then a DVD, but I
can't really recall... anyway, it was impressive.

~~~
ck2
I'm wondering if you live in a city with tall buildings (I don't) so we have
different points of reference?

To me, large amounts of land are definitely more distinctive than vertical,
especially when it takes you a long amount of time to walk across, you get the
perspective of your small size in comparison.

Let's say the stack was twice as high as the empire state building, does that
really give you perspective? To me that would be meaningless, I have no
understanding of such height.

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gabrielroth
Why doesn't the picture show 300 million little guys standing next to all the
money?

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nbergus
I haven't had my coffee yet, so help me out. The pile of $100 million seems
more than 100 piles (or 10 rows of 10 piles) of $1 million to me.

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podperson
I think a trillion dollars looks like this:

<http://bit.ly/dnRfBG>

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navs
They considered making a trillion dollar bill but The Simpsons already did it.

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mikecane
One trillion is nothing. It's a quadrillion of accounting debits that've been
lost -- or which actually never existed due to massive fraud.

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oldstrangers
That site is really, really awful.

