If you are like me you’ve found that media reports concerning the economic crisis include dollar amounts that stagger the imagination. So, to get a better handle on what the figures mean, I surfed the Internet for some help. Here are two attempts at helping us grasp what $1 trillion dollars looks like.

Visualization #1:

“If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would have taken you until October 2737 to lose a trillion dollars, or a little over two thousand seven hundred years.”

            Source: http://www.herald-review.com/blogs/letterstotheeditor/?p=1269

Visualization #2:

In order to make (a little more) sense of a trillion dollars, begin imagining a hundred dollar bill:

Now, imagine a bundle of one hundred $100 bills, which would total $10,000 and be about one half inch think:

Next imagine standing next to a pile of one hundred packets of $10,000, which would total $1 million dollars (it would fit in a grocery sack):

Now imagine increasing the number of packets until you have a total of $100 million dollars, which would fit on a wooden pallet:

Then imagine standing next to the number of pallets required to contain $1 billion dollars in the same packets of one hundred $100 bills:

And finally, this is what you would look like standing next to $1 trillion dollars (that’s a $1 followed by twelve zeros)—note the pallets are now double stacked with the same bundles of $100 bills:

            Source: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html