How to Imagine Trillions of Dollars

The Federal Reserve is prepared to lend as much as $4.5 trillion to fight off a depression. Congress may vote to authorize another two or three trillion in financial aid. Getting one’s head around all those trillions isn’t easy.

One way to understand large numbers is to convert them to seconds. If you lived one trillion seconds ago you were back in the stone age.

This old post imagines a stack of $100 bills tall enough to add up to $1.25 trillion. It was 850 miles high! (A stack worth $4.5 trillion would soar over 3,000 miles into the sky. If laid on its side across the U.S., it would stretch from sea to shining sea.)

Here’s a view of $1 trillion in $100 bills. For scale, note the little man at the lower left corner.

References to trillions of dollars are becoming commonplace. Will our grandchildren have to get used to quadrillions?