Martina Portamayou, Chief Political Correspondent
A “trillion” is “in.”
It is, hands down, the hottest number in the American lexicon today, and for good reason. 
It’s the newest “power word,” kind of like “Weapon of Mass Destruction” used to be. If you know a lot about a trillion dollars, it says something about you. It says you know a lot. It’s on the lips of economists, politicians, and bankers who are starting to casually drop it like bomblets in news interviews and congressional hearings to get everyone’s attention. It’s the “neutron weapon” word that stills a congressional hearing room.
Senator: “And how much is that going to cost us?”
Witness: “A trrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiioooooonnnnnnnnnnnnn dollars, Senator.”
It’s so much money, that by all rights that’s how many letters we ought to use to spell it and how we ought to say it.
And, it’s a cool phrase too. It just rolls off the tongue. Try it.
“A trrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiillllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooonnnnnnnnnnnnn dollars.”
So just how much is a trillion dollars?
For starters, it’s $1,000,000,000,000. That’s 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars. What can we do with it? According to serious experts and current events, here’s the list of things that can be done with $1 trillion:
a. Fight one war in Iraq. $1 trillion is now the common figure used to estimate the price tag for the war. I am not sure, but in hindsight, we probably could have simply bought Iraq for half that amount five years ago and given it status like Puerto Rico, Guam, or the USVI. That would have saved a lot of trouble.
b. Avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system. At least this is what Secretary of the Treasury Paulson tells us. The financial portfolios of millions of Americans, from stocks to retirement account to the kids college education fund, have already melted. I’m not sure just who else is left to be “protected from the meltdown of the U.S. financial system,” but I apparently we didn’t make the list.
c. Rebuild one-half of the bridges and roads in the U.S. in dire need of repair. For those of us unfortunate enough to drive on the other half of the roads and bridges that will continue to collapse and crumble because $1 trillion is not enough, hold on to your Hummers and 4-wheel drives.
d. Pay back China for the amount of debt it is owed by the U.S. Apparently, because of the over $1 trillion U.S./China trade deficit (think iPod), every man, woman, and child in the United States has over the past 10 years in effect borrowed about $4,000 from every man, woman, and child in the People’s Republic of China. This is true. I received a letter recently from a Mr. Hung Cho Lee of Shanghai Province, and he is most definitely counting on getting back every yuan I apparently owe him so that he can buy a car.
These dire needs, from fighting wars to paying back China, are all well and good. But in my view, they lack poetry and imagination. Frankly, it’s our money we’re talking about here, so we ought to be thinking bigger about what a trillion dollars really means and what it’s worth. Here are just a few examples.
It is a fact that If you laid $1 trillion worth of one dollar bills end to end, you could make a lot of strippers happy. However, you could choose to keep your head about you, forgo these strippers, and build a chain of those same one dollar bills that would stretch from the earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! In fact, one trillion dollars in “singles” would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. I say “nearly” because a least a couple hundred billion would go up in flames before you reached the heat of the sun leaving you nothing to spend when you got there. Everyone knows this.
Here’s another bit of trillion dollar trivia for you, and indeed an alternative to the next “fiscal stimulus” plan already being contemplated by the government that I would happily support. It would take a jet flying at the speed of sound, spewing out a constant string of dollar bills behind it, fourteen years before it ran out of $1 trillion. Can you say “stimulus?” How stimulating would it be to join your friends, neighbors, and family for the daily slug fest as this money flitted to ground from overhead each day, every day, for fourteen years?
And I’m just getting started. I recently uncovered a list developed by Andrew Davis, Communications Director for the Libertarian Party, of other incredibly interesting things that $1 trillion will apparently buy. I like the way this guy Davis thinks. Here’s a partial list, with an admitted bit of running commentary on the side. $1 trillion buys:
Everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo. In my view, this would be stupid because everyone in LA already owns a Lamborghini.
Getting half of the Democratic Party into a fundraiser for Barack Obama at the $28,500 admission price. I am confused as to why this is on the list as a novelty because I was at this event in September.
Giving one out of every two men in the United States a Men’s Presidential Rolex watch or buying every woman in the United States a Tiffany Diamond Starfish Pendant. I think the outcome of this choice is pretty clear. I won’t be getting rid of my Timex anytime soon.
Sending everybody in America on an all-inclusive vacation to Italy. I would personally strike this from the list as this already occurred when I was honeymooning in Florence last year.
Buying everyone living in Belize and Malta a Manhattan apartment. If everyone in the Upper West side gets a vote, I am thinking we end up buying everyone in Manhattan an apartment in Belize instead. Or a time share would be fine.
Buying everyone in Buffalo, NY their own 65-acre island in Panama. My family’s from Buffalo. Believe me, they won’t hold out for a balmy island in Central America. They’ll take sixty-five square feet of Myrtle Beach anytime between November and May.
So that about does it for what $1 trillion will buy. For those who can’t get enough of the “Law of Large Numbers,” I leave you with this. When I was in grade school, we studied the number “Googol.” Anyone who knows the concept of a Googol also knows that it equals a lot more than one trillion. Indeed, it is the number “1″ followed by one-hundred zeros. Now that’s a lot of money. However, the more recent definition of a “Googol” has changed just a bit. Today, a Googol is what you would be worth had you been one of the original investors in “Google.”
Copyright 2008 – The Saturday Morning Post - All Rights Reserved
You show your ignorance by stating inferring that Yen is Chinese currency. You do know the Yen is Japanese right? Oh, of course not, you’re an ignorant American. Sorry, my mistake…
No problem. Thank you for your apology. By the way, please explain the phrase “stating inferring,” and try not to use the word “ignorant” in your explanation.
SMP
1 trillion Yen, Yuan, Dollars …mate who cares. If I had that money, i would know what to do:
1) Buy “some” Beeerrrrrr (imported!)
I will buy Tavarisch Putin a bazooka! so he can go hunting without risk. He will appreciate
Gordy, W., Obama, Vladimir, JM, even the Alaskan Tiger, Poulsen, Bernake, the Iron Lady-senator from New York, Chiang Kai-shek, Tavarich Joseph, Adolfin, and Benito… (the list is open to suggestion) I will call all those good strippers you mentioned earlier, and recruit Silvio B. as host and piano-bar singer… and I will say… hei guys just cut the crap, have some fun for sometime, and leave us alone… I guess that will be a true investment.
2) Smoke (literally) a few hundred millions with good stuff imported (imported is the key word, we need to sustain the market)
3) Go to Vegas and capitalize on that sum (for the future), half of it on number 8 (after all, it is more or less what Secretary Poulsen’s fellow-wallstreeters… did with “our” money)
4) buy some pretzel to George W. (imported from China…the pretzel not W. – he is 100% homemade!) and pay off the debts of poor Hillary (I know that count as two choices…but hei i do what i like with my money)
5) I don’t have a Lamborghini, I go for one…I will just buy off the factory.
6) Buy some more beer (imported from Japan this time)
7) I will buy some weapons of mass destruction and give them to Iran, Korea, and Iraq…so next time no one can complain!
9) I will call Osama…and buy him a voucher to pay a visit to my Barber Vincenzo (he is very good)
10) …I will by the formerly-known-as planet Pluto, build there a large villa and invite some guests:
Would you like to come to the 8th annual Writing Frontier Christmas Party?
SMP
It’s been expensive and will get more expensive. U.S. tactical air power keeps the enemy at bay. We have gone from earth to deep space and with satellite control, we have better bay-o-nets than we had before. The political class keeps the citizen in a state of constant alarm and prey on the resulting fear. The old war resulted in freedom from fear and want. Freedom of speech and religion continue. The headlines could read: World War Fought By Mistake.
The political propaganda keeps growing and getting more expensive. It looks to be a spare no expense effort. If you don’t have spare time, there’s always spare change. It rough here, so I’m rolling spare change. Let’s Roll!
When I delivered the paper, we rolled thm and put a rubberband around them. You could throw them further, thus saving foot work while completing your paper route faster. Those were the days. Keep rolling.
Brother, can you spare the time?
SMP
How One Man Beat the Depression
When depression was at its depth in 1932, the late Lew Reese, who had worked at the potter’s trade in West Virginia, came to Scio on a hunting trip. He found the town on the verge of ruin; employment there had dropped to its lowest ebb. An old pottery, which had failed five years earlier, was for sale for taxes. Seeing a chance to try out ideas of his own in white ware manufacture, Mr. Reese borrowed $8,000 on his insurance and took over the abandoned pottery.
GOT CLAY?
Lew had a $1,000 payroll, $20,000 in other bills. In cash, he had exactly 11 cents.
The Scio Pottery stopped making pottery in 1985. Now it does bagging cement and custom cement blending. They also put decals on mugs for Custom Edge. There goes the romance of it all.
SMP
The city of Defiance, Ohio, was founded at the fort’s location. In 1904, the site of the fort was chosen as the site for the Defiance Public Library.
Don’t mess with the librarians! Books are still free, so how bad can the economy really get? Shoot to thrill. Bullets haven’t gone up in price with everything else. You can always handload your own. If that doesn’t work, the old bow and arrow is still good for the hunt. Happy hunting Writing Frontier.
A librarian one would actually want to mess with, somewhere between “Fiction” and “How To.” http://tannas.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/shelving_in_silhouette.jpg
SMP
I’m using all my spare time for leisure activities. If you have leisure, I have time. If not? Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn! Clark Gable grew up near Scio. Classy librarian. Thanks.
I think the main thing about the TRILLION dollars you mention is that it will create both another $TRILLION in nominal debt that the taxpayers put on their tab to somebody, and it will create over a $2 TRILLION payback by those same taxpayers with interest.
Also, if my memory serves me well, in this country it took from the 1700s to 1974 to create the first TRILLION dollar in economic activity, debts, credits, whatever.
And, now, with our incredible burgeoning debts, we create another TRILLION in NEW DEBTS every six months or so.
Does anybody else either see how this can EVER work out for us taxpayers, or alternatively, that we need monetary reform so that EVERY NEW DOLLAR IS NOT CREATED AS DEBT?
Right you are. Can you say “out of control?” For a look at how this next trillion is going to be paid for, see http://writingfrontier.com/2008/09/28/smarter-than-this/
SMP
I have doubts that the $700 billion bailout, if enacted, would work. Me too.
“Having financial institutions sell the loans to the government at inflated prices so the government can turn around and sell the loans to well-heeled investors at lower prices strikes me as a very good deal for everyone but U.S. taxpayers. Surely we can do better.
One alternative is a “net worth certificate” program along the lines of what Congress enacted in the 1980s for the savings and loan industry. It was a big success and could work in the current climate. The FDIC resolved a $100 billion insolvency in the savings banks for a total cost of less than $2 billion.” William M. Isaac, Washington Post
I kind of like that idea. That’s a gain of $98 billion or at least not a loss of $98 billion. The national debt is growing at a rate of $3-4 billion a day. You don’t hear much about “net worth certificates”. Maybe Writing Frontier can investigate it. We need a surplus growing by $3-4 billion a day. The kids are going to need lunch money and all that.
FIGURES YOU CAN’T FIGURE, GO FIGURE
I just got this:
Gagliano: The glasses are the CDO investors. Those at the top of the pyramid get filled with interest foam first. Actually that sentence sounds kinda disgusting, so I’m gonna rephrase it: they get paid first. Lower-tier investors get paid, only if there’s enough interest to trickle down that far. In return for their risk, those investors get bigger returns. And during the housing boom, CDO investors got nice and drunk off subprimes. Interest flowed all the way to the bottom of the investor pyramid. Then the bust happened. Subprime loans started defaulting. So there’s less and less interest bubbling out of the CDO champagne bottles.
Hirsch: Which means that only maybe the top two or three layers are gonna get filled, and that bottom layer of glasses, well, they’re fresh out of luck; no champagne for them.
Gagliano: That’d be bad enough. But it gets worse. See, during the boom, that bottom layer of glasses was full? And the owners recycled the champagne. they poured it into new bottles, which were supposed to fill whole new pyramids of glasses. These secondary CDO’s were now full of risky securities, based on the riskiest kind of mortgage. It wasn’t champagne — more like Mad Dog 20/20. But investors didn’t know it, because ratings agencies didn’t label this stuff as risky. Now, says Westgate’s Mike Hatley, there’s hell to pay.
http://origin-marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/03/cdo/
And when the media is drinking champagne tonight with their political buddies they won’t be giving it thought. Not only didn’t the ratings agencies do the job, the media was asleep at the switch as well. Now there’s hell to pay and people are stuck with bad mortgages. “The value of all the credit default swaps could be $40 trillion or $50 trillion — nobody knows for sure…” You know the numbers are bad when nobody knows for sure. The Post is way down along with the other newspapers. If you can figure out the value of the swaps you might be doing the impossible.
Gagliano: How much money is tied up in these secondary CDO’s?
Hatley: Hundreds of billions of dollars. I’ve seen some predictions that the ones that were done based on subprime mortgages in the year 2006 and 2007 will default. Every single one. Even the ones that were originally rated Triple-A.
Orders plunge and debt soars, so you get an idea of how it’s going to go for the immediate future. Not good. They’re talking more taxes and you wonder what will be left to tax. Champagne? Bubbles?
You write about a trillion dollars as if it will have the same buying power in 6 months as it does today. A trillion dollars is simply an example of inflationary policy run amok. There’s possibly $100 trillion in worldwide circulation and holdings, but that figure is mostly represented by debt, not things of value.
The number means nothing in the long term because private banks can create as much money as they want to. It’s called hyper-inflation.
Quite a valuable observation, we think. The world carries more debt than value. We value your opinion, and stand in your debt.
SEP