A little perspective...

CrazyRabbit

Imagine a structure made from €1 coins tightly packed together. It is 1000 coins wide, 1000 coins in depth and 1000 coins in height.

This structure stands 7.6 feet tall (2.3 meters). It is 76.2 feet in width & depth (23.25 meters) and weighs 7500000 kg (7500 Metric Tons).

This is 1 billion Euro (1000 million - on the short scale).

And we now owe quite a few of these. :eek:

Humans are not very good at imagining such large values, and tend to drastically underestimate.


(P.S. I'm going to look like a right eejit if my math is off...which happens on occasion)

Jesus Wept

Let's build one.

super_furry

Can we not just sell these structures then?

OutlawPete

That made me think we owe less

red menace

You know if you get it in notes it will be much smaller and lighter.

Just saying is all

KeithM89_old

We should just pay it back in one cent coins....

FoxT

That is about 200 lorryloads.

Hard to imagine, easy to articulate

cml387

If you could hand out 1 euro coins at the rate of one every five seconds it would take you 126 years to give away 1 billion of them.

Mr Benevolent

We did this topic a few weeks ago.

El Weirdo

cml387 wrote: »

If you could hand out 1 euro coins at the rate of one every five seconds it would take you 126 years to give away 1 billion of them.

1 every 5 seconds? Get someone other than an eighty-year-old woman to do it then.

cml387

El Weirdo wrote: »

1 every 5 seconds? Get someone other than an eighty-year-old woman to do it then.

And you think an eighty year old woman would be giving a way 1 euro coins?

RMD

Ye, but banks deal with mostly notes and computers.

That 85 Billion could just be stored as number on a usb key, how's that make you feel.

El Weirdo

cml387 wrote: »

And you think an eighty year old woman would be giving a way 1 euro coins?

If that's what she's employed to do, yes.

biko

If you were given a euro every second since you were born you would have 1000 euros after 16 minutes and 40 seconds
You would have a million euro after 12 days BUT you would have to become 31 years old before you had a billion euro.

Wait are we talking UK or US billions here?

Mister men

Coins are for students and dole bluggers. I only deal with cash.:)

Iwannahurl

Confab wrote: »

We did this topic a few weeks ago.

We probably owe another billion between us since then.

CrazyRabbit

biko wrote: »

If you were given a euro every second since you were born you would have 1000 euros after 16 minutes and 40 seconds
You would have a million euro after 12 days BUT you would have to become 31 years old before you had a billion euro.

Wait are we talking UK or US billions here?

UK, otherwise known as 'short scale' as mentioned in OP.

US (Long scale) is a considerably bigger sum of money!

Iwannahurl

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

UK, otherwise known as 'short scale' as mentioned in OP.

US (Long scale) is a considerably bigger sum of money!

Is a US trillion therefore super-sized compared to a European one?

If so the US public debt is even more pathologically huge than I thought.

FoxT

So if we went to the federal reserve with 1 billion euro, and they gave us 1.3 billion dollars, we'd make enough profit to wipe out all our debt?

Assuming we converted our 1.3 billion dollars back into euro say 100 million at a time, to avoid interpretation risk?

PeterIanStaker

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

This structure stands 7.6 feet tall (2.3 meters). It is 76.2 feet in width & depth (23.25 meters) and weighs 7500000 kg (7500 Metric Tons).

7500 metric tons you say? Lets drop it on Harney.

CrazyRabbit

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Is a US trillion therefore super-sized compared to a European one?

If so the US public debt is even more pathologically huge than I thought.

A US billion is 1000000000000 (one million million).

Consider that when you hear of US multi-billionaires like Bill Gates with $54 billion.