UPDATED 07:37 EDT / FEBRUARY 08 2012

Big Money Data: What’s A Trillion Dollars Look Like?

Though world has yet to know a trillionaire, I think there’s little harm in picturing the many things that a trillion dollars can do. And why not? It’s true that the world has always talked about money in 10 digits, but that’s about to change. In order to make sense out of the global financial mess, we will need the help of three more zeros, hitting the trillion dollar-mark.

Thinking of a trillion dollars makes me dizzy. That’s a lot of numbers past your traditional nine-digit calculator. As a comparison, the bills making up a trillion dollars laid end to end would reach the sun–it will take 32,000 years to exhaust all of them should you spend a dollar per second. If you convert them to pennies, they would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses, the world’s largest known dinosaur.

But apart from the absurd semblance, here’s an infographic from Mint that looks at what a trillion dollars can actually do in contemporary times (because it would probably cost about a trillion dollars to lay a trillion dollars worth of bills into outer space).  According to Mint, one trillion dollars is enough to run the federal government for 103 days, or fund every military of every NATO country combined. It can also pay for every US military intervention since 9/11, and equals the market value of all stocks traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Where’s our money really go?

Speaking of money, where does it all go? Why is it so great? A piece by Adam Crowe aims to make sense of it all. He talks about what money really is, the money supply, how the money crisis expands and the infamous credit crisis. Crowe’s article also involves complicated factors such as easy credit, house booming, mortgage securitization, market saturation, lowered loans and more.

Gas and auto can be considered one of the biggest industries in the world. In this infographic by personal finance site Bundle, Nicholas Felton makes a follow-up of his previous graphic about America’s spending on food and drink, and talks about gas and auto expenses this time around. Bundle says that “the average household spent $5,477 on gas and auto expenses last year…an amount which accounts for about 14.5 percent of daily spending. That’s more than we spend on groceries or utilities, and more than we spend on travel, entertainment, clothes and shoes, and hobbies — combined.”

Using data to earn money

Enough of crises and expenditures, let’s take a look at how to earn money by forecasting financial markets. Investors consider economic and fundamental factors a great deal to pin point investment opportunities. At the end of the day, however, the price of assets will depend on two factors: supply and demand. If you have a good grasp of how price assets shift, you can understand the fluctuation of prices and the market as a whole. This infographic by Simit Patel of Informed Trades demonstrates the exchange rate of Euro vs. US dollars, and is an effective material in forecasting financial markets.


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