What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

March 12, 2009 2:38 PM

What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?
posted by ZenMasterThis (75 comments total)

And thats $100's. Imagine if it were singles.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:39 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

A whole bunch of bald dudes.
posted by Elmore at 2:40 PM on March 12, 2009

I think Amber likes me.
posted by gman at 2:41 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

In pennies, it would weight the same as 16,666 blue whales.
posted by GuyZero at 2:41 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

gman: if you had $1 trillion, you could give Amber $100 tucks.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:42 PM on March 12, 2009

ZenMasterThis: What is the sound of a trillion dollars?
posted by not_on_display at 2:43 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Paupers! I've got a hundred trillion dollars! and it fits neatly in my wallet.

ok, it's zimbabwean and I bought it off ebay
posted by BigCalm at 2:44 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

What is the sound of a trillion dollars?

Hope, despair, love, loss, and mystery.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:46 PM on March 12, 2009

In pennies, it would weight the same as 16,666 blue whales.

I'm more used to thinking in units of Routemasters and football pitches, but the cetacean system works just as well. Thank you.
posted by Sova at 2:47 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

Well, at least I have been selected to receive a free Nintendo Wii.
posted by pokermonk at 2:47 PM on March 12, 2009

BigCalm - that's nothing. I'm bidding on $8 000 000 000 000 000 [Eight Quadrillion] dollars, now mine for $1.26 with free shipping!

I'm sure there's some meaning behind it, but to my untrained eyes, the Hundred Trillion dollar bill logo looks like three large rocks. In other words, this paper is worth a pile of rocks.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:50 PM on March 12, 2009

My new backup plan for when the economy gets really bad is to start paying for my groceries with bald dudes. Thanks for the tip Elmer.
posted by mannequito at 2:50 PM on March 12, 2009

Yeah right, no way is there a shed big enough to hold all of that.
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:51 PM on March 12, 2009

Excuse me , Elmore
posted by mannequito at 2:51 PM on March 12, 2009

What are you talking about, Charlie! That's just walking around money!
posted by Astro Zombie at 2:51 PM on March 12, 2009

One Trillion Dollars!
posted by jckll at 2:53 PM on March 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

This is precisely why they print trillion dollar bills.
posted by billysumday at 2:54 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

My dick.
posted by davejay at 2:57 PM on March 12, 2009

What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

My dick.

That's quite a deficit.
posted by crossoverman at 3:02 PM on March 12, 2009 [13 favorites]

When I think about stimulus packages and bailouts I will now think of all sorts of interest groups and companies lining up outside a shed, waiting to stuff their grocery bags with stacks of $100 bills from rows and rows of pallets.

Weird.
posted by 3FLryan at 3:06 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

Now imagine that money ablaze. On fire. Up in smoke. Does it stir your heart? Does it make you angry? What the fuck, you ask, why are you burning all that money?

I suggest you calm down.

Chill.
posted by Mister Cheese at 3:06 PM on March 12, 2009 [6 favorites]

What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

My dick.

You have quite the stimulus package.
posted by gman at 3:09 PM on March 12, 2009 [4 favorites]

ZenMasterThis: What is the sound of a trillion dollars?

Nowadays, a little sumpin' like this:

Whooooooooooosh!

(brought to you by American Standard)
posted by Benny Andajetz at 3:09 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Just the other day I was watching some special on the Travel Channel on candy manufacturers. They visited a handful of factories and as rows and rows of candy passed by on conveyor belts, the narrator would point out that the company made X pounds of candy a day, which equals Y pounds a year!

And then, without fail, the show would cut to some company representative who proudly pointed out that if you laid out all of the candy bars they made in a year end-to-end, it would encircle the globe Z times.

It's an interesting cliche because beyond the sheer absurdity of the premise, it doesn't really illuminate anything. Is there a fundamental difference between circling the globe 5 times or 50 times or 500 times? Either way, that's a lot of candy. Really, it only comes in handy to point out the number of times something will circle the globe if you measure everything that way. Then you can say, "P'shaw, a year's worth of Tootsie Rolls would only circle the globe 7 times? That's nothing--M&M's circle the globe 22 times and they're a lot smaller!"

Regardless, I have done some calculations and unless I dropped a 1 somewhere, I figure that if you took 1 trillion dollars in one dollar bills, it would circle the globe a little more than 4,704 times. Think about that the next time you watch a show on making candy.
posted by turaho at 3:10 PM on March 12, 2009 [5 favorites]

I'm sure there's some meaning behind it, but to my untrained eyes, the Hundred Trillion dollar bill logo looks like three large rocks. In other words, this paper is worth a pile of rocks.

That's how many rocks it covers. Warning: No scissors are pictured.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:15 PM on March 12, 2009

In pennies, it would weight the same as 16,666 blue whales.

I ran your numbers, and I get 1 666 666.67 blue whales. Did you mean a trillion pennies, or a trillion dollars?
posted by Krrrlson at 3:21 PM on March 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

See also The Megapenny Project.
posted by Skot at 3:25 PM on March 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

2.5g per penny, 150 metric tons per whale. Oops, you're right, I forgot to multiply by 100. Today is "GuyZero Fails Arithmetic" day on MetaFilter.

Also, I do taxes really, really cheap.
posted by GuyZero at 3:26 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

You can also think of it as the total income tax collected in 2006. That might help put these trillion dollar deficits in perspective.

I posted a few more ways to visualize it here.
posted by BigSky at 3:34 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Ah, that's just peanuts to space.
posted by Smedleyman at 3:36 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

How much is a trillion? - "A trillion dollars is about the total amount collected in income taxes by the U.S. federal government in fiscal year 2006 -- $1.04 trillion, if you're curious to use the exact number. That gives me a simple rule of thumb for personalizing these numbers. If I want to know what an additional trillion dollars in government borrowing or spending will mean for me, I just imagine what it would be like to pay twice as much in federal income taxes for one year."
posted by kliuless at 3:36 PM on March 12, 2009

With all these bailouts and a spiralling deficit, we're actually going to need these graphics posted on our refrigerators to help us estimate how much hyperinflationary money we have.
posted by crapmatic at 3:36 PM on March 12, 2009

There is only about 1.5 trillion dollars total currency in circulation (M1 money supply). This is what confuses people who get upset about "printing money". Yeah, it adds some to inflation (as intended to fight deflation), but most of the money supply is M2/M3 which has nothing to do with currency or printing presses. Beware gold bug prophets of doom.
posted by stbalbach at 3:42 PM on March 12, 2009

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

I wish more millionaires would do this. It would really make mugging people a more fiscally feasable way of making a living.
posted by quin at 3:48 PM on March 12, 2009

The only thing I could think of when I saw the trillion dollars visualized was, "Welcome to Costco. I love you."
posted by Brak at 3:49 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

One trillion dollars can buy a lot of bling
One trillion dollars can buy most anything
One trillion dollars buying bullets, buying guns
One trillion dollars in the hands of killers, thugs

Fuck the world, a lot of people gonna die tonight
Fuck the world, fuck 'em all
posted by vsync at 4:03 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Or how many Ningis?

"In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, The Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has every collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination."
posted by mattoxic at 4:07 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Nice visual, but the amount upsets people less than the final destination.

In Reading there is this thing called the IDR, short for "Inner Distribution Road", which is bureaucratese for "Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently".
posted by Mblue at 4:23 PM on March 12, 2009

Not having single-payer healthcare or publicly funded college. That's what a trillion dollars looks like.
posted by DU at 4:32 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

You know what I'd do if I had that?




Two chicks at the same time.
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:41 PM on March 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

This is how The KLF makes its promised comeback: the K Foundation Burn a Million Trillion Quid.
posted by 1adam12 at 4:52 PM on March 12, 2009

This has sort of been done before.
posted by Effigy2000 at 5:02 PM on March 12, 2009

Two chicks at the same time.

If "chicks" is a nickname for "entire major university sorority houses," yes, you probably could.
posted by maxwelton at 5:05 PM on March 12, 2009

One day I took a service call on a printer in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in DC.
When I walked in the room, the 1st thing I saw was a skid of $20 bills.
It was the only time I saw 'enough' money in my life.

Later I guesstimated that it was about $20,000,000 and now I see I guessed about right.
posted by MtDewd at 5:36 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

filthy light thief, You've been outbid. See what you get for posting your auction on metafilter!
posted by cjorgensen at 5:38 PM on March 12, 2009

I like to use time as a way to understand the incomprehensibility of large numbers. In this case, with 86400 seconds in a day, and calculating 30 days in a month:

(WARNING: I am bad at arithmetic.)

1 million = 11 days, 13 hrs, 46 mins, and 34 seconds
10 million = 3 months, 25 days, 17 hrs, 45 minutes, and 36 seconds
100 million = 3 years, 2 months, 2 days, 9 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds

1 billion = 31 years, 8 months, 19 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds

ONE TRILLION = 31709 years, 9 months, 19 days, . . .

The difference between 1 million and one trillion is a long time to live.
posted by mistersquid at 5:41 PM on March 12, 2009

What I want to know is, what does a trillion dollars smell like?
posted by MrGuilt at 5:50 PM on March 12, 2009

One trillion dollars can buy a lot of bling
One trillion dollars can buy most anything
One trillion dollars buying bullets, buying guns
One trillion dollars in the hands of killers, thugs

Fuck the world, a lot of people gonna die tonight
Fuck the world, fuck 'em all

Did you rip that off the Unabomber?
posted by BrnP84 at 6:14 PM on March 12, 2009

Here's the funny part. The amount lost in Credit Default Swaps and other similar instruments?

Fifty-five Trillion dollars.

In other words, they somehow lost more than anyone ever had. Go figure.
posted by Xoebe at 6:44 PM on March 12, 2009

^ $55T is the estimated "handle" on the CDS. What is lost depends on the bets you made, for every loser (AIG) there is a counterparty taking their money.
posted by troy at 6:52 PM on March 12, 2009

Metafilter : I'm sure there's some meaning behind it
posted by liza at 7:02 PM on March 12, 2009

So, I'm the first person to see this and think about Scrooge McDuck swimming in it? Huh.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 7:19 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

What is the sound of a trillion dollars?

I'm thinking about it now....
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 7:29 PM on March 12, 2009

That's useless, it doesn't tell how many times the stacks could reach the moon, or something.
posted by IvoShandor at 7:33 PM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

When I saw this the other day, some one at work asked how much it would weight. So, I went out in the lab and weighed a few hundreds. Turns out they weighed about 1 gram (from 1.05 g to .935 g and do all the other denominations I tried). So, a trillion dollars in $100s would weight 10 billion grams or 10 million kilograms.
posted by 445supermag at 7:39 PM on March 12, 2009

Ah, that's just peanuts to space.

Heh.

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

-Richard Feynman

Note: First year the budget deficit was greater than one hundred billion was 1982.

-----

This is what confuses people who get upset about "printing money". Yeah, it adds some to inflation (as intended to fight deflation), but most of the money supply is M2/M3 which has nothing to do with currency or printing presses.

I'd just like to point out to those who are unaware, that the government has not been releasing data on M3 since early 2006. Here are some charts of the U.S. money supply, including estimates of M3.

I'm not so sure it's the "gold bug prophets of doom" we need to beware of.
posted by BigSky at 7:46 PM on March 12, 2009

If you have a trillion dollars on your credit card then a trillion dollars is just big as... a credit card! So this way of visualizing the "bigness" of a trillion dollars is really just telling us something about the size of paper currency. It would be more pertinent to the stated objective (All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"...) if we measured the trillion dollars in people-units. A trillion bucks is just over $3000 for every person in the U.S., which may or may not seem as "big".
posted by twoleftfeet at 8:00 PM on March 12, 2009

So they're trying to show you what $1 trillion looks like, but the dude in the picture who's supposed to be looking at it has no eyes.

I get it. The dude in the picture represents America.
posted by jeremy b at 8:12 PM on March 12, 2009

1 million = 11 days, 13 hrs, 46 mins, and 34 seconds
10 million = 3 months, 25 days, 17 hrs, 45 minutes, and 36 seconds
100 million = 3 years, 2 months, 2 days, 9 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds
1 billion = 31 years, 8 months, 19 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds
ONE TRILLION = 31709 years, 9 months, 19 days, . . .

Remember, It's three minutes to Wapner.
posted by gman at 8:20 PM on March 12, 2009

A trillion bucks is just over $3000 for every person in the U.S., which may or may not seem as "big"

Or ~80M working a minimum wage job for a year.
posted by troy at 8:24 PM on March 12, 2009

I showed this to my daughter. She loved it. Cool link. Thanks!
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 9:36 PM on March 12, 2009

See also The Megapenny Project.

Just what I was coming here to mention. By Metafilter's very own kokogiak, too, who also does the oft-mentioned The Big Picture.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:40 PM on March 12, 2009

BrnP84, it's the song "One Trillion Dollars" by Anti-Flag. There's an accompanying essay with some background information.
posted by vsync at 11:41 PM on March 12, 2009

If I had a trillion dollars,
I'd buy you a million monkeys.
(haven't you always wanted a million monkeys?)
posted by moonbiter at 11:44 PM on March 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

But... what does 59 trillion feel like?
posted by tybeet at 5:41 AM on March 13, 2009

In other words, they somehow lost more than anyone ever had. Go figure.

It's not hard to lose what you never had -- you just say you have it, and then when someone asks to see it, you say you lost it.

What's really tricky is having more than anyone ever had. I'd be freaked out if they had pulled that one off.
posted by rusty at 6:14 AM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

Picture the average Joe American bent over with their pants around their ankles with Uncle Sam right behind them going to town. You can add a few rich CEO douche bags dancing in the back ground if you like for flavor.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 6:50 AM on March 13, 2009

Yeah, but how many C-17's does it take to fly those pallets to Iraq?
posted by Pollomacho at 6:56 AM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Picture the average Joe American bent over with their pants around their ankles with Uncle Sam right behind them going to town. You can add a few rich CEO douche bags dancing in the back ground if you like for flavor.

Don't forget to draw the Statue of Liberty crying in the corner, too.
posted by Spatch at 7:22 AM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

When I think about stimulus packages and bailouts I will now think of all sorts of interest groups and companies lining up outside a shed, waiting to stuff their grocery bags with stacks of $100 bills from rows and rows of pallets.

Whenever I think of pallets full of money, I still can't help but think of this. Seems like chump change now, but that's what $125 billion on pallets looks like.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:34 AM on March 13, 2009

I think I haven't had that reaction to a GIF since I first saw Tubgirl.

Different reason, though.
posted by kittyprecious at 8:25 AM on March 13, 2009

I'm puzzled at the way this "visualize a trillion dollars" thing has become a standard trope of critics of the bailout and the stimulus plan. They clearly feel that they're making some kind of point, but I just can't feel the rhetorical force of the point. Do they really think that anyone is out there saying "yeah, sure, spend a trillion, see if I care" and then they see this graphic and say "hold the goddam phone! A trillion dollars end to end goes how many times around the earth? Right, that's it, I'm voting Ron Paul from here on out."

I have this image of some poor libertarian being told how many atoms there are in penny (more than there are stars in the frickin' galaxy!!!) and finding himself incapable of ever spending another one (how can I throw away entire galaxies worth of atoms???). It's oddly childish--but then I think that most people have a rather childish view of how economic systems work. I think the people who are impressed by this kind of thing think of economics as essentially a zero sum game. You have a pile of money, and if anyone else gets more money, that can only happen by some of yours being taken away. They look at the govt. spending a trillion dollars and can't see the myriad ways in which that money flows back to the very people who are spending it. They can only see this as money that went away from their pile and made it smaller.
posted by yoink at 4:19 PM on March 13, 2009

I have this image of some poor libertarian being told how many atoms there are in penny (more than there are stars in the frickin' galaxy!!!) and finding himself incapable of ever spending another one (how can I throw away entire galaxies worth of atoms???).

Uh, what? I'm the one who supplied the quote referencing the number of stars in the galaxy, and Feynman made the comparison in order to show that the huge numbers we associate with measurements in astronomy are themselves dwarfed by the size of our liabilities. The implication that its rhetorical force is at all equivalent to the silly corruption quoted above, is ludicrous.

It's oddly childish--but then I think that most people have a rather childish view of how economic systems work. I think the people who are impressed by this kind of thing think of economics as essentially a zero sum game. You have a pile of money, and if anyone else gets more money, that can only happen by some of yours being taken away. They look at the govt. spending a trillion dollars and can't see the myriad ways in which that money flows back to the very people who are spending it. They can only see this as money that went away from their pile and made it smaller.

In my experience, it's socialists who view the free markets as a zero-sum game, and capitalists who explain the economy with the image of a growing pile. To quote Ludwig von Mises, "Most actions do not aim at anybodys defeat or loss. They aim at an improvement in conditions.". But that image only applies with respect to wealth. When we're talking about money, it's a different matter. Like the bumper sticker succinctly says, "Inflation isn't magic, nor a force of nature. The government is simply stealing from you.". When the government creates money out of thin air, they devalue the currency. It's what a counterfeiter does. There's a reason why that's a crime. Yes, the creation of more money makes the pile of money larger but the size of the pile of wealth, in other words limited resources, is unchanged. And so, the purchasing power of your share of the pile of money, which has stayed the same in absolute terms, decreases. And when the government is projecting a budget deficit 1.75 times the amount of income tax from three years ago, it seems quite likely that they'll have to devalue the currency in order to manage the debt (which by the way is more than two orders of magnitude greater than all the stars in the galaxy!!! - and that's not counting future liabilities! - your share, future liabilities included: $184,000).

But even if they don't devalue the currency, the increase in taxes is still taking money away from the taxpayers. How could it not? The feds will be taking more out of their stack. You can talk all you like about the benefits of that money circulating around, but it's a losing proposition for everyone, let alone the taxpayer whose burden grew. If an increase in federal spending was good for the economy, there would be no reason to limit it. Why stop at hundreds of billions, or a quintillion for that matter? The wise move would be to just open up the throttle and run it Mugabe-style.

However, I noticed an ambiguity in your post. You write, "They look at the govt. spending a trillion dollars and can't see the myriad ways in which that money flows back to the very people who are spending it.". If "the very people who are spending it" refers to the government, then yes, the money they spend does indeed flow back to them.
posted by BigSky at 9:22 PM on March 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

If "the very people who are spending it" refers to the government, then yes, the money they spend does indeed flow back to them.

BigSky: Have you ever held a state or federal job? Or a contractor's position in which you worked side by side, in tandem with state or federal workers?

If you have, then you know that those workers are not robots. Nor are they members of a reptilian alien species. Nor or they tight-lipped, authoritarian mandarins, educated in secret, communist party sponsored academies to ensure their full indoctrination into the party orthodoxy. They are ordinary people, taxpayers themselves, who could be your neighbor, that guy in line at the gas station, that lady who lends you her jumper cables outside a restaurant.

This is the US. The US Federal Government is the largest not-for-profit corporation in the US, originally chartered by and under the collective legal authority of the American people. Unlike every other major corporation in America, its executive officers can be held accountable for poor decision-making and other failures through democratic election processes. Shareholders of large corporations are seldom allowed to exercise the kind of power granted to ordinary American citizens through the power of the ballot box.

What do we get in return for our voting shareholdings in America Corp? A truly publicly-held company that's capable of tapping an enormous pool of public resources to provide virtually any service or function the private sector fails to provide adequately or that it can't provide within reasonable expectations of affordability, safety and performance.

If government and the public services it provides disappeared, those services could only be provided by the private sector. And like every other service industry, those new markets would eventually come to be dominated by only a handful of powerful corporate interests. And these corporate interests would be just as unlikely to operate reliably in the public interest as most modern corporations are, only without a functioning federal government around to limit their growth and power, these companies would become de facto governments unto themselves, privately-held governments whose executive leadership would be as impervious to public scrutiny and shielded from accountability as modern corporate CEOs.

Is that the kind of nation Randian libertarians want? A country run entirely in secret boardroom meetings by appointed CEOs and their handpicked boards of directors, with no opportunities for the public to influence public policy at all, since they can't really bring much market pressure to bear on the private regional company with a monopoly on operating what used to be the state highway system, nor on the company that supplies the county with potable water?

State officials can be voted out of office. County officials, too. Goods and services that are essential to succeeding economically in the modern world or that are basic necessities for survival represent a special category of demand--a kind of demand that unregulated competition can't satisfy alone without leaving open dangerous opportunities for exploitative and abusive market practices. As consumers, we can't cast a direct vote against the CEO's of the companies who make products we consume. We can, however, usually choose not to consume those products anymore, which may have a similar, though less direct, effect. But who do we vote against if the company that provides our drinking water is churning out a toxic waste tainted product? We could drop our fee-based residential water service, but then what?
posted by saulgoodman at 8:28 AM on March 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

saulgoodman,

I had hoped to get a little free time to respond to your post, but it has been a busy week. This is on the quick. However you and I have both shown up in a number of these threads and perhaps at some future occasion, if appropriate, I can respond more fully. Or not.

Briefly, I disagree that government (which has the power of monopoly) is more accountable, efficient or responsive than private industry. It's the competition for profits and customers that develops such qualities. Government has a tendency to increase (take a look at the Ratchet Effect described by Robert Higgs) which necessarily intrudes upon and diminishes the private sphere, meaning less freedom, less efficiency. This doesn't mean that if government is sharply limited a few powerful corporate interests will necessarily take over. Many libertarians are strong critics of modern corporations, but their criticisms are frequently ignored because they point out how government regulation - oversight agencies, certifications, etc. - frequently hurts the small businesses disproportionately and distorts the playing field to favor the corporate interest. The libertarian solution to the environmental example re: potable water is to bring suit against the company if they are destroying the watershed which you have a right to, or to do business with someone else.

Also, I'm not sure why you implied I was a "Randian libertarian" as I've posted a few comments sharply critical of her on here in the past. Libertarian is not the same as Objectivist.
posted by BigSky at 1:07 PM on March 23, 2009 [1 favorite]