CARPE DIEM: What Does $1 Trillion Look Like?

Sunday, March 08, 2009

$1 million ($100 bills):

$1 trillion (notice the guy in the lower left hand corner):

At 3/08/2009 11:35 AM, bix1951 said...: waste of paper
At 3/08/2009 1:53 PM, Anonymous said...: I made a more easy to read diagram for [insert your adjective here] people.
http://i41.tinypic.com/2rdjn82.jpg
Hope you don't mind.
At 3/09/2009 4:03 PM, juandos said...: What paper bix1951?
At 3/15/2009 12:02 AM, Bob Cosmos said...: That looks more like $300,000 to me than $1,000,000. Each bill is 6" long, and at 1/2" per 10,000 in depth, 100 packets stacked in a 2 by 50 pattern would have a width of 12" and a depth of 25". The average man's size ten shoe is just around 12", which would make the perspective on the width correct. The depth looks quite short of 25".

Still the comparison is boggling. Who gave Obama a flippin trillion dollars again?
At 3/19/2009 10:18 AM, Anonymous said...: I can't even fathom this amount. So when trying to fathom the full 4.5 Trillion all this nonsense will cost, my brain bursts out of my skull.

Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.