Stephen Withrow's List: Finance & Investments

Now suppose you had a stack of thousand dollar bills that was four inches in height. If you did, you know what? Congratulations, you’d be a millionaire.  

 Now suppose you wanted to enter the super-elite of the wealthy and have a billion dollars. How tall of a stack of thousand dollar bills would that be? 

 The answer is a stack only 358 feet high, seen here barely reaching 1/3rd of the way up the Petronas towers. 

 Now how about a stack of thousand dollar bills to equal a trillion dollars? How tall would that stack be? Think of an answer.  

 Well, that stack would be 67.9 miles high. 

 And I meant stack, not laid end to end or anything cheesy like that. A solid stack of thousand dollar bills, 67.9 miles high. Now that’s a trillion dollars. 

 That still doesn’t do it for you? 

 Okay, I want you to imagine that you’re in a car on a roadway that is lined at the side with a sideways stack of thousand dollar bills. A nice, compact, rectangular column of thousand dollar bills is snaking along the roadside next to you as you drive. 

 You drive along brrrrrrrrrrrrr without stopping for a little more than an hour, and the entire way there’s that stack of thousand dollar bills right next you, on the side of the road, the whole way.  

 Said another way, the amount of money created in the past 4.5 months in our economic system, if it had been printed up as thousand dollar bills and stacked along the side of the road, would stretch from Springfield, Massachusetts to Albany, New York.  

 So there it is. Either you can visualize the stack better by driving along next to it, or by standing on top if it, or any other way you wish to express this statement.  

 But make no mistake, a trillion is a very, very big number and we should not be lulled into complacency simply because it is too big to really get our minds around. That should drive us to action instead.