How come the papers are only reporting in Billions? What’s happened to normal money?
The financial scale has changed from millions to billions and I am lost in all the big numbers. The one thing I still understand is the size of a Payday Loan.
Dad, how much is a billion, exactly?
A Billion dollar Payday Loan sounds like fun and of course it’s a joke. But everything seems to be at least a billion dollars these days. Has your child asked you to explain one billion yet? When we were kids there was almost no such word. The upper limit of our vocabulary and our imagination was about a million. These days the word ‘billion’ is on the front page of every newspaper every day.
“On Wednesday the House of Representatives approved President Obama’s 819 billion dollar economic stimulus plan.” I’ll settle for the $819 part of that – it is almost the exact amount that the power company says I owe them for unpaid electrical bills. IBM’s equity stands at 27 billion dollars. Ford lost 6 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2008. The German government votes to help German banks with a 623 billion dollar bail-out. It’s hard to believe one can get bored reading about billions!
819 billion dollars would give every single person in the world $117. It’s not a bad idea – half the people in the world have an annual income of less than $100.
What exactly is this billion that everyone is writing about? I decided to investigate.
How long would it take to count to one billion?
If you count one number every second without stopping until you reach a billion, the task would take you 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds.
How much is a billion in time?
Here are some ideas to stun you:
A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
And a billion dollars?
At the rate our government is spending money, a billion dollars lasts only 8 hours and 20 minutes.
A billion dollars is a lot of cash. Actually, that depends on who you speak to. Bill Gates made a cool $50 billion last year. According to Forbes there were 793 billionaires in the world in 2005. None of them applied for a Payday Loan.
Mr. Madoff and $50 billion
This guy allegedly has siphoned $50 billion from the world’s economy. When you say it like that, it sounds like a kid’s game of Robin Hood or Ali Baba. It means that if the entire 7 billion person population of the world lined up in front of Madoff, every person, man, woman and child, would hand over $7.14 as they passed him. Where has it all gone?
How much space would $50 billion fill?
If Mr. Madoff took all the money home and tried to hide it, he would have a problem. If $50 billion was spread over a football field the players would be buried in about 30 feet of money.
Back to reality
After that brief excursion into the world of the billions it’s back to my $815 debt to the power company. My main objective is getting them off my back and turning the lights back on – thanks – I’ll take that Payday Loan. It will also save me taking a spare battery home from the office every evening so I can use my laptop at home.
Oddly enough, thinking about these numbers makes me think of “The Six-Million Dollar Man” (I watched it in syndication when I was a kid, OK?)… Today, what would $6 million buy for Steve Austin? A little toenail?
A billion is an incredible number – and a lot more money than most of us are ever going to see, that’s for sure. I definitely think that part of the stimulus should have gone to the taxpayers. It is our money after all.