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How Much Is A Trillion?
Submitted by Adam Taggart of Peak Prosperity,
One trillion is a big number. In this short clip, we try to help you get a sense for just how big; but the reality is simply that the human brain can't really suitably comprehend magnitudes this large.
Which is why we should be concerned that the US' money supply has ballooned to over $12 trillion dollars over the past decade. And that its outstanding debts and liabilities are many multiples that amount.
We are living in an era where our leaders are making decisions at orders of magnitude that they simply can’t truly understand. And many politicians have less expertise in math, economics or business than most of you reading this. When they vote for the next trillion-dollar bailout, raise the debt level by another trillion, or pressure the Federal Reserve for another trillion-dollar stimulus program – they don’t have any real sense of what the implications will be. No one can.
We have reached the point where we’re operating in territory beyond our neural programming.
As a result, unintended consequences to our current policies are guaranteed.
* * *
Coming next Friday: Chapter 13: Debt
For those who simply don't want to wait until the end of the year to view the entire new series, you can indulge your binge-watching craving by enrolling to PeakProsperity.com. The entire full new series, all 27 chapters of it, is available -- now-- to our enrolled users.
The full suite of chapters in this new Crash Course series can be found at www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse
And for those who have yet to view it, be sure to watch the 'Accelerated' Crash Course -- the under-1-hour condensation of the new 4.5-hour series. It's a great vehicle for introducing new eyes to this material.
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GLOBAL MONEY MATRIX SELF DESTRUCTS
A trillion is enough money to pay 12.5 billion wage slaves for one eight hour workday at $10/hr.
A Trillion is peanuts compared to a Quintillion! Just confer with Zimbabwe, they can tell you just how fantastic it is to print endlessly!.
chump change apparently nobody I speak with seems to care. I tell peeps hey debt is 17.7 trillion up 1trillion in 11 mos and the attitude is no big deal so I know it is a lot but when it hits the fan I will remind them no biggie. I read an article that Harry sent says 700 gold and 10 silver how is that? guessing he wants to buy mine
Simply mint 17 nice and shiny trillion dollar coins and trow them into the Ocean. Problem solved.......
Made of unobtanium, of course.
17.7 Trillion is enough money to pay 314 Million American wage slaves for 708 eight hour workdays at $10/hr.
Change to:
Every American Owes 32 Months of their indentured sevitude.
INSOC:
Replace 'Indentured Servitude' with Patriotic duty.
A trillion here, a trillion there, soon we are talking real numbers.
Means nothing anymore.
Digits on a screen.
It has occured to me that the American currency as the reserve currency of the world has a bit more resilliency than one might think using standard economic models. Here is why. In Brazil or Mexico or many other places in the world you can actually buy and sell things in dollars which may be preferred to their own failed currencies. This means that a dollar is backed by more than just the American taxpayer. It is backed by actual products and services in other countries as those pieces of paper are used to trade. This makes it stronger not weaker.
So, when I try to reason through why the dollar has not imploded in an inflationary spasm, two possibilities come to mind. The first is just what I mentioned before. The second is that most of these dollars are still sitting dormant as reserves in the American and even world banking systems. They are not moving. There is no velocity. I believe the velocity is a dismal 4.4 compared to a pre-recession 17.2. Velocity has a huge impact on inflationary pressure. Ever see the videos of people stopping at lunch to take a wheelbarrow of money to the local store to buy bread before it went up in the afternoon (German Republic circa 1921)? That is the extreme.
The Fed and central banks are learning that they really cannot stimulate demand with just monetary policy and zero interest rates. People actually have to have jobs and also a slightly optimistic view of the future before the money will start moving again. Both are missing right now.
I am interested in any economic opinions on my first point, too, especially from traders and economists.
lets see what happens when the dollar is dropped from trade worldwide as has been reported on ZH before.
that drop in the banksters pockets would end world hunger for 30 years by providing the food directly to the starving.
on tenth would end it for good if properly invested.
I got 99 trillion problems but a bitch ain't one of them?
I got a $99B market cap and revenue aint $1.
It isn't really a math problem anyway, it is a political problem. Who was it that said, "we have all those trillions in debt because foreigners save too much." Bernanke?
How about the following comparison ...
# FED printing $1 Trillion per year
# AMD revenue $4 Billion per year
250 Companies the size of AMD is what the FED is 'printing' out of thin air - EVERY YEAR.
A trillion is nothing.
A quadrillion. Now THAT'S something.
We will almost certainly hear those numbers in our lifetime. Our grandparents and even parents probably never thought they would hear trillions, much less 17 of them.
Trillions is debt slavery, but,
quadrillions is debt insanity!
The question is when this house of cards will crater...
A trillion won't be so difficult to grasp once it becomes the price of ten gold bars or one tanker of crude oil.
When it gets to Godzillions let me know.........
They'll print to googolplex, the BOJ and Fed and ECB, but will do it in concert so the ratios stay 1.3ish and 104ish on the crosses.
Thirty one thousand , six hundred , ninety years worth of seconds , plus or minus
Millions Taken From Motorists by "Officers"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/stop-and-seize/
The cops will simply confiscate a trillion from the sheeple
You don't carry tens of thousands of dollars in cash in your car for legitimate reasons (unless you're some sort of coin dealer). Most of these people are engaged in illegal activity, legitimate businesses simply write a check. If you have the cash, you can deposit it and write a check.
Riiiiight. Once the cops carrying it it becomes a legitimate part of his department's budget though. Long live tyranny! "What are you doing with your own money? You are now guilty until proven innocent." You have to prove it's your own money or pay the State's legal fees if you don't. But the guy who had his money robbed by the police is the illegitimate one. That takes some double think.
Making "cash" transactions illegitimate is to force everyone into the financial sector. If your not an unsecured creditor to some bank, you are some sort of criminal.
Agreed. The antithesis of liberty.
How much does a 9.0 earthquake cost in S.F. Or L.A.?
"How Much Is A Trillion?"
Not enough.
All the gold ever is worth like 8 trillion USD so all's we have to do is get all of it and then dig up 5,000 years worth and we'll have almost enough to pay it back. It only costs about $1200 to dig an oz out so in 10 million years we should get back to even. That 40 years of unlimited War and Welfare was well worth it. Keep buying stocks though everyone. -sarc.
If there were a supply of 12 trillion units of money, then the higher standard of living for everyone would be of one which were genuinely fostered by a healthy economy and prosperity. That much productive work would be a good thing for sure.
Yeah if your chimpanzee brains could visualize a trillion it would be more likely they could also visualize this is all made up shit in the first place. There is no trillion dollars anywhere. Not in debt or cash or anywhere but your mind. It's a collective agreement to hallucinate.
Make the trillion dollar coins. Can you count to 17? Easy even for chimp brains.
It's a fucking imaginary.
Or gosh maybe we ought to find a clever way to show how many pennies this is. How many atoms are in a dollar bill? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin...
Cancel the agreement with the extortionate money creators and all the numbers change. They are owed less than nothing. How about a video on what less than nothing looks like. Get your chimp brain around that.
Those trillions of dollars are backed by the abilities of weapons of mass destruction to kill trillions of people.
I agree, the human mind is NFG at intuiting anything about numbers as large as a trillion.
Only for some people that limit is more like a hundred. Obama. Cough.
There's something in mathematics called "The Law of Large Numbers" which is, "They are all the same!" that tries to capture some of this issue, though that tends to be meant more for numbers with a trillion digits, not a shrimpy little deficit number with just twelve or thirteen digits. A trillion digits, or two trillion digits, makes remarkably little difference to much any mathematical theory.
... though I suppose nowadays, if you have 128gb thumb drive, that's a trillion binary digits right there. I mean a trillion atoms of gold is worth like nothing. Um, what was the question again?
Udated by Brad Plumer on September 4, 2014
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6105631/map-galaxy-supercluster-laniakea-mil...
Behold the Great Attactor
of our own Super Cluster!
Money has become so cheap to borrow that many people are now arguing that you must take it even if you don't know what to do with it. It is hard to imagine how much this is distorting the economy, markets, and reality in general. A total disconnect between life on main street and the financial world is occurring and it is putting the economy in a very dangerous place.
It is often hard to determine what is true, but a report on Bloomberg that 32 Trillion dollars in funds were held in offshore accounts around the world made me shutter. How safe is this money, and what exactly is it doing? Can you say Cyprus? More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/05/cheap-money-more-and-more-and-mor...
One trillion is a million times a million. Explained it in 8 words.
edit: I see the video said the same thing, so - take the city of San Jose, CA which has a pop of a million. Attach the same-sized city to each of the inhabitants, that's a trillion. (27 words)
Amazing what one can accomplish with advanced mathematical concepts like multiplication.
When it comes to money and taxes I like to think it terms of people and millionaires. I think it is appropriate because WE the people must produce or back the money with our labor and ingenuity.
A trillion is a milion millions. So, with a trillion in debt it could have been used to make one million people millionaires. 17t in debt could have been used to make 17million people millionaires. Only four states have populations great than that (CA, TX, FL, NY) and those numbers include children. We could have made 17 million people millionaires. Let's further consolidate that into families where two people are married (gay or straight) or even living together. That would be 34 million adult households.
Let's make it worse because I enjoy this. Let's take the 12t in money supply and add that to the debt. Using the same calculations we add another 24 milion households for a total of 58 million homes get a million bucks. Who needs banks outside of a storage function, then? Virtually every man woman and child in the nation would now live in a household with millionaire parents.
Let's go one worse because this is really good. Add up the actual government spending by your state, county, city, the Feds and essentially all the taxes you actually paid if you are in the private productive (not government) sector. This is what was spent before we got to any federal debt. Your states and cities carry debt to on top of that 17t and YOU are on the hook for all of it, every last cent. Anyway, if we added the real spending on top of the money supply and and debt the number pretty much means everyone has enough money to be a millionaire...that has been spent in our name. You cosigned those loans and payments BTW, even though you didn't know it.
Yeah, I understand a few of the fallacies in my numbers but the main point is still legitiimate. The point is that mind boggling amounts of money have been squandered by the gods of government. It is enough for all of us to be relatively well off. Now, I NOT a leftist redistributionist but I do think it is worth looking at to sort of get a feel of how our productivity is is used, abused, squadered, plundered and devalued by the government and governors who rule us. It is why I do not ascribe to the religion of government, it's caring, wisdom, genius or moral superiority to anyone.
A Trillion is, as a Trillion does.
A trillion aircraft carriers or a trillion kopeks.
Very big. Very little.
Debt is money that has been spent. Only money is spendable at par. While debt must be "serviced", the terms can be re-arrannged.
Debt is money that has been spent. Only money is spendable at par. While debt must be "serviced", the terms can be re-arranged.
Debt is money that's been spent. Money is spendable at par. While debt must be serviced, the terms can be re-arranged.
Anybody up for a round of Monoply? I will be playing by the rules but at the same time will have a xerox at bay... who wants to play? Anyone???
What is a xerox?
Snakes-and-Ladders updated for modern life .
All Snakes and no Ladders .
Ya know, I have asked people how much a trillion is and they have shrugged their shoulders. They don't know. When I tell them that our national debt is 18 thousand billion- their eyes glaze over. When I tell them that this is just a fraction of what we owe, they turn into gapers.
They don't care. That of course, is the problem summarized.
I liked this collection of attempts to present the meaning of $trillions:
http://demonocracy.info/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKpVlDSIz9o#t=0
$1 Trillion & US Debt in Physical $100 bills
Anyway, more repetitions of stuff:
$17,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOOBAMA!
The exponential growth of debt slavery, which is BUILT into the structure of the established monetary system, required President Obama to preside over doubling the total debts, as Bush II presided over doubling the total debts before that. The next President would have to preside over doubling the total debts yet again, to stop the established systems from collapsing into chaos! Each subsequent President would have to preside over the same process, to keep things going. That was built into the structure of the Money-As-Debt system, with its demand for interest paid on that Debt, from the first moment that system was legalized.
Here is a link to a video from a few years ago ...
back when the USA money supply was 10 trillion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24c1ysDwPE0
The Gig is Up
Money, the Federal Reserve and You
That says IDEALIZED money
is a matter of functions four:
1. Medium;
2. Measure;
3. Standard; and
4. Store.
Money in forms of Coins, Currency & Credit.
INTRINSIC MONEY VERSUS FIAT MONEY.
"Money" meant Coins with intrinsic value.
ALMOST ALL "MONEY" BECAME CREDIT!
It was such classic Bizarro Mirror World
devolution to transform intrinsic money
into fiat money that was simply credit.
That history turned our money into being
the opposite of what money used to be!
That video visually dramatizes reality,
particularly starting at the 56:16 mark,
& then especially at the 1:00:40 mark,
that video presentation made the CRUCIAL POINT that the derivatives' bubbles are measured in QUADRILLIONS, which has become even more incomprehensible DEBT INSANITY!Fractional reserve banking was legalized fraud
that drove more & more debt slavery to grow!
However, derivatives, on top of all the fiat money,
have driven debt insanity to grow beyond belief!
Debt slavery is leveraged to become debt insanity.
After we went from debt slavery to debt insanity,
real feedback death control shall follow similarly!
MY MAIN POINT IS ALWAYS THAT REAL WORLD
MONEY IS MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER.
Chris Martenson's crash course follows patterns typically found in Zero Hedge articles, which are presentations of "IDEALIZED solutions" based on the superficial notions about what "IDEALIZED money" should be. Indeed, since REAL money is actually measurement backed by murder, almost everyone does their best to deliberately ignore that fact when proposing their preferred "solutions" to the exponentially increasing problems driven by "money" made out of nothing as debts by privatized banks.
The REAL world has become globalized electronic frauds, backed by the force of atomic bombs, both of which operate on orders of magnitude which can only be comprehended intellectually, as mathematical operations, without any way to intuitively understand those calculations. Thus, the REAL world has become debt insanity backed by the threat of death insanity.
Theoretically, the only REAL solutions must be better death controls, to back up better debt controls, which should be understood as the ways that natural selection manifests through human beings as systems of artificial selection. However, since the established systems are based upon triumphantly enforced frauds, where all the most "successful" people operate within those enforced frauds, there is no politically possible, practical ways to present the REAL story, since that story is backwards to what almost everyone believes or wants to believe.
Unless one is consuming huge overdoses of psychedelic drugs, to perhaps assist one's imagination, it is difficult to approach better understanding of the magical mathematics that has been developed by the banksters, as their bookkeeping magimathematics has been able to develop every possible excuse, one after another, to legally make more and more "money" out of nothing as debts, which frauds were enforced by governments, which always had to grow exponentially due to the interest that had to be paid on that money made out of nothing, by continuing to find excuses to create more money out of nothing, as more debts ... in a vicious spiral, that demands each President, acting as a puppet of the banksters, preside over doubling the total debts yet again!
Meanwhile, most of the mainstream morons, and different kinds of reactionary revolutionaries, which present alternative "solutions" to these runaway problems tend to continue to base those solutions upon their versions of what IDEALIZED money should be, which was always what personally worked best before, to be able to "successfully" operate within the established systems. The typical Black Sheeple that get republished on Zero Hedge, or who comment upon those articles, tend to deliberately ignore how and why governments became the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, which are now the biggest gangsters, the banksters. Therefore, they are able to present relatively good analysis of the problems, after which they collapse back to bullshit "solutions" based on the same old false fundamental dichotomies and impossible ideals regarding what money should be, and so, base their solutions upon those ideals.
Of course, I can sympathize with that, since facing the REAL facts that the world is controlled by Huge Lies, backed by Lots of Violence, which have been amplified to astronomical SIZES, for all practical purposes means that there are NO REAL SOLUTIONS to those problems. I merely repeat my views on attempting to understand these issues for their own sake, to propose solutions which make theoretical sense, given the nature of the REAL problems, without any reasonable residual expectation that more radical truths about the INSANITY of debt insanities backed by death insanities, measured in the TRILLIONS and QUADRILLIONS of units, will make any practical difference to the eventual psychotic breakdowns of those systems.
Yeah but, all new presidents will just blame the guy before him.
And then moan and groan how hard and difficult their job is. You know, the one they just spent a billion dollars and a grueling year of their life on the road to aquire.
Dad always said, " don't trust a fucker that spends a million dollars to get a job paying $140,000"
HomObamma screwwing everyone and everyTHING.