One Trillion Dollars Visualized | Hacker News Reader

One Trillion Dollars Visualized

mint.com

35 pointskqr27 comments

I was hoping for some of my other favorites:

-Placed end to end a line of one dollar bills would stretch from the earth to the sun

-You could could more than cover I-10 from coast to coast in hundred dollar bills (six fifteen foot wide lanes)

-Stacked on top the pile of one dollar bills would stand 63 thousand miles tall or a bit over 1/4 of the distance from the earth to the moon.

I did a quick Google on how much cash physically exists. It lead me to this forum post (http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=174425&h...) which is probably bordering conspiracy theory (I have no idea) but offers some interesting things to consider nonetheless.

There's a lot of scale mixing in this. There's been a lot of inflation since the new deal. Does this factor that in? Australia's GNP for one year and the Canadian stock exchange don't strike me as impressively large. As soon as they mention them your mind jumps to the better known equivalents which are bigger.

"The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), a subsidiary of the TMX Group Inc., is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the eighth largest in the world by market capitalization." (Wikipedia)

Also, from the same article: "As of 31 December 2007, the TSX had 3,951 listed companies with a combined market capitalization of $2.2 trillion."

To me, that seems impressively large enough.

Sure, except as soon as someone mentions stock exchange your mind jumps to wall street. If I say peanut butter you think of jelly right, same thing. And as soon as that happens the TSX is not not the biggest in your mind. Same with Australia, you think wow that's big but not nearly as big as the US.

Brought to you by people who read much faster than me (and I read faster than all but one person I know personally). Seriously. I had to pause it every single time text came up to even have a hope of reading it. It was even too fast with pausing.

Our national debt is going to go up.

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