In my dad's day, the mafia hoods in the movies talked about "10Gs" like it was all the money in the world.
In my younger days, when you wanted to express the idea of "a lot of money", you said "a million." However, in the last couple of decades, during which we have been allowed to see the government's finances, the meaning of a lot of money has changed.
We had multi-billion-dollar Olympic building projects. Multi-billion-dollar defecits. Then Enron showed how a company can make billions of dollars disappear. So the word billion came into common use, meaning a lot of lucre.
Now, stimulus packages in the US have scratched the trillion-dollar mark. How soon will it be that kids will be playing cops and robbers
or corrupt politician and investment bank manager, and then the robber, or investment bank manager,
shouts something like "stick 'em up, I want a trillion dollars in unmarked bills."
It really is surprising how our language is way ahead of reality. Most of us will never see anything nearing a million dollars passing through our hands, from pay-check to bill payments.
Meanwhile others, namely derivatives traders, were trading billions per day, and taking millions per-year home with them as their cut. Much of what they were doing was trading fictitious monetary vehicles, but that doesn't matter.
They, and their bosses, still got to take home real money. And I've been wondering lately where all our money went, because a lot of money just disappeared.
Now I have my answer.
Update: Economist DeSoto on Channel 4 news, used the word quadrillion which could be the size of the toxic derivate paper. Luckily, nobody's sure about the actual size of this black hole.
