72 years to print a trillion dollars

By TIM SPANTON

ONE trillion American dollars sounds a lot of cash - and it is.

But did world leaders at the G20 summit really understand the scale of what they were promising when they agreed to spend that amount reviving the world's flagging economy?

Another way of saying one trillion is to think of it as one thousand billion or one million million.

In numbers it is 1,000,000,000,000.

The US Bureau Of Engraving And Printing produces 38million notes a day, so printing one trillion new notes from scratch and working seven days a week would take just over 72 years.

And you would need 429,646 tonnes of ink to complete the job.

Stacked in one pile, one trillion one dollar notes, each 0.0043in thick, would be 67,866 miles high - the same as 12,344 Mount Everests (29,029ft).

Put another way, the stack would be 8.6 times the diameter of the earth, running through the North and South Poles (7,901 miles).

A one dollar note is 6.14in by 2.61in. Stretched end to end, one trillion of them would reach 96,906,566 miles - that's 403 times the distance from Earth to the moon (around 240,000 miles).

Big bucks ... stacked in one pile, one trillion one dollar notes would be 67,866 miles high

If they didn't shrivel in the process, the notes would even go past the sun, which is a mere 92,960,000 miles away. It takes light about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth.

So if you were at one end of the line, looking down a telescope, and there was a greedy banker nicking your notes from the other end, it would be eight minutes and 39 seconds before you could see what he was up to - though you would probably have guessed long before that.

Speaking of greedy bankers, one trillion dollars would pay "Sir" Fred The Shred Goodwin's £703,000 pension (1,040,659 US dollars) for 960,928 years.

If we shared it out fairly, one trillion dollars would give every British man, woman and child £11,073.

If the world's leaders spent the one trillion dollars at the rate of a dollar a second, they would still be spending it in 31,689 years. On the other hand, if they want to get through it all within ten years, they would need to spend 3,169 dollars a second.

The mind-boggling figure from the G20 summit is considerably more dollars than there are in circulation.

According to the US Federal Reserve, there are just 829billion US dollars in existence.

It also costs 6.4 cents to print each note - so it's a good job the massive sum will be passed on electronically.

So rapid is the pace of deficit spending by the federal government, that the National Debt has increased over a trillion dollars since President Obama took office.

On Inauguration Day, the Debt stood at $10.626 trillion. The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows that as of July 31st, the debt hit $11.669 trillion.

During the last administration, it took over 2 ½ years for the National Debt to increase a trillion dollars. But by the time former president George W. Bush left office, he had run up the deficit by a record amount: $4.9-trillion over eight years.

Otherwise there would be a 64billion dollar black hole in the leaders' historic bailout package, which would rather defeat the point.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/money/article2360477.ece#ixzz0URfcOT3Q