For now, the current financial crisis seems to exist as a simply bewildering cloud of threat. It seems too sprawling and complex to be fully grasped and too massive and abstract to actually seem personal (so far).
Much of the eye glazing (brain glazing, really) for me at least comes from those dollar sum prefixes. A million is something major; a billion is many millions, and a trillion is that next big sum as we move up the ladder. And we’re hearing trillions tossed around more and more lately in this cloud of threat. So, how much is a trillion?
A stack of $100 bills equal to $1 million is about 4ft. A billion is 4,000 ft. A trillion is 789 miles.
In seconds, one million = 11 days; a trillion = 32,000 years.
At a spending rate of $1,000/day, a $ trillion would last 2.7 million years.
Breathtaking sums for those making something under $50/hr. (who would need at least 9.5 million years to earn that trillion). An impossible reach up, yet the toxins which now have the markets staggering all began with financial titans reaching down to woo struggling peckerwoods like us.
Seductive logic, overreaching, and the bogus notion that houses could never lose value set this killer circus in motion. And it’s amazing that this towering system, circulating uncountable sums of money, could be crippled by the side effects of dancing with bottom feeders like us.
My, my don’t we all feel empowered?
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