It has been conservatively estimated that the United States Treasury together with the Federal Reserve Board has loaned and/or given approximately 5 trillion dollars to banks and other financial institutions this year in their attempt to stabilize the economy. Everyone keeps talking about the 700 billion dollars involved with the bailout measure, but there were huge amounts of money involved as far back as last winter being loaned to banks at low interest rates. Little, if any of this money ever has been repaid.
The mere mention of a figure such as 5 trillion boggles the mind. When the word “dollars” is added after it, the mind cannot possibly grasp the immensity of it. Not too many years ago, a very wealthy person was called a “millionaire”. Anyone who owned a million dollars was looked upon as one of the richest people on earth. Now game shows have prizes of a million dollars.
These days the people who are very wealthy are called “billionaires”. There are only a few of them in the world, but they pretty much dictate much of what goes on in this world due to their incredible financial influence. The Warren Buffet’s and the Bill Gates of the world truly are in a class by themselves as far as their net worth. But, as rich as these people are, none of them even come remotely close to being a “trillionaire”.
When these kinds of numbers are tossed around, no one can possibly grasp how big they really are. For people like me, a hundred dollar bill is still something very special and unique. It would take ten billion one hundred dollar bills to equal a trillion dollars. Logically, it would take 50 billion one hundred dollar bills to equal the 5 trillion dollars spent to try and save the American banking system. I hope all these big numbers have gotten the point across that we are talking about a lot of money.
On the other side of coin (so to speak), in the African country of Zimbabwe, they have such horrific inflation that their money is basically worthless. Before they revalued their currency recently the following shows how bad it had gotten.
Can you honestly imagine spending 10 trillion “whatevers” to get some breakfast? I guess you could if the value of your “whatever” was basically zero. The more these huge numbers are tossed around, the more it makes you wonder if the day is coming in this country when a cup of coffee will cost a trillion dollars.
If I were running this country, instead of giving the banks 5 trillion dollars to squander; I would divide that number by the 300 million people in this country and GIVE each one of them an equal share. Talk about stimulating the economy. If each person in this country received an equal proportion of 5 trillion dollars, the amount each would receive would be:
$16,666.666
Food for thought.
