Word: trillion
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...have to take office as both chambers attempt overrides of the veto. Such a situation might force Obama to expend some of his political capital on fixing the holdover problem, and it could drain support for what he prefers to be concentrating his time and energy on: a potentially trillion-dollar stimulus bill. That too, of course, is essentially another bailout, but it's directed at Main Street, so the President-elect can count on a little more gratitude from the American public. If he can't spend his entire inaugural week celebrating, that's the least he can expect...
...system was fool-proof. Even remarkably intelligent economists and journalists talked and wrote about "the Chinese Miracle." In 2007, the nation's GDP was $3.2 trillion, but was growing at 11%. U.S. GDP was well over $14 trillion that year, but its growth rate was 3%. It was only a matter of time before the lines crossed. (See pictures of China's wild side...
...think of it is in terms of seconds," says David Schwartz, a children's book author whose How Much Is a Million? tries to wrap young minds around the concept. "One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. I like to say that I have a pretty good idea what I'll be doing a million seconds from now, no idea what I'll be doing a billion seconds from now, and an excellent idea of what I'll be doing a trillion...
...with a section of the stadium that he figured contained about 10,000 seats - an image he can now think back to whenever a person starts talking about tens of thousands of a particular thing. When numbers get too large, though, that method breaks down. A stack of one trillion $1 bills would reach more than a quarter of the way to the moon - replacing one incomprehensible thought with another doesn't do much good...
...next move on to more formal manipulations. When trying to comprehend a trillion-dollar deficit, you might calculate how much money that represents per person in the U.S. One trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans comes out to $3,333. Then you search for a useful comparison. A convenient - though perhaps unsettling - comparison is to the amount of credit-card debt carried by the average person in this country. That figure is $3,245. "So a good way of thinking about government debt financing is that it's similar to what the average person is doing," says Camerer...