Trillions and Trillions

One trillion. Can you imagine exactly how much is one trillion? Written down it is a one followed by twelve, yes you have it, twelve zero's.  Come to think of it, it is only in recent times that we have come to hear about this number when the world was in the midst of a financial crisis.  But to be honest, I had heard the number once before when Dick Cheney, as the secretary of the Department of Defence, stood before Congress and said the DOD could not account for one trillion dollars!

Now here is the thing how do you misplace one trillion dollars? It's not like it is a single bill! Google it and see how much dough it really is. To put it in perspective, you could spend a million dollars a day for a million days which means that in order to spend all that you would have to live for 2737 years! 

In the last few weeks the US deficit was increased by another 2.3 trillion, and I stand corrected, it now exceeds 14 trillion dollars.  Imagine that, cause I am simply having a huge problem quantifying this number.  Perhaps the only country that could have probably even come close to actually having this amount of money visible was Zimbabwe at one stage.  They even had a million Zim Dollar bill!

So what you may say how does this affect me? Well it is quite easy, it seems the trillion is the new "million" and it gives us mere mortals something to strive for. I cannot wait to see at the first house on the market being sold for a trillion!  I can remember when I saw the first house being advertised for a cool million.  It was a sight to see.  Today most properties in the middle to upperclass go for no less than a million.  What about a billion do I hear you say, if we look at large condo's they cost a few billion to build and I even saw a house, 43 stories, which was built for a billion dollars.

So there is a new target for the status conscious a trillion, forget the million it's so yesterday, forget the billion it's too much in the vogue, go for the big one! The trillion!

As for me,  the first 10 000 will do ;-) 

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