How Much is $1 Trillion?

$1,000,000,000,000. A one followed by twelve zeros. Easy.

The way that big numbers like $1 trillion are sometimes thrown around, it doesn’t seem like a terribly large amount. “$1 trillion” looks a lot like “$1 billion” which looks a lot like “$1 million”.

And hey, $1 million is nothing to scoff at.

But if $1 million sounds like a lot, consider that $1 trillion is one million one millions. If they made one million dollar bills, a whole bathtub’s worth of them wouldn’t equal a trillion dollars.

Let’s say someone told you to wait for something. If you waited one thousand seconds, it’d only take about seventeen minutes. If you waited one million seconds, you’d have to wait about 11 1/2 days. You’d probably be pretty bored.

But if you waited one trillion seconds, it’d take 31,688 years.

Thank about $1 trillion in terms of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. GDP is a measurement of the value of all goods and services produced in a country in any one year. To put it simply, it’s the total value of all the goods and services that everyone in a country produces in one year.

$1 trillion is over $200 billion more than the GDP of Australia ($795,305). It’s more than the combined GDPs of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland ($993,314). (For a full list of PPP-adjusted GDPs, click here.)

If you had $1,000,000,000,000 in cash, you could buy:

• 282 billion Big Macs
• 3.1 million Ferrari 599 GTBs
• 769 New Yankees Stadiums
• 28,571 flights into space as a tourist
• 66.7 billion copies of Oliver Stone's Wall Street

And if that still doesn’t seem like a whole lot, consider these facts (click the arrows on the left and right to see more):

 

© 2012 The Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy