$2,000,000,000,000.00

This past Friday, global financial markets lost about two trillion dollars, in the wake of the results of the Brexit vote. That’s a very large number, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

Here are are several ways to look at it: Assuming the market was open for eight hours, that’s two hundred and fifty billion dollars an hour.

Which comes out to a little more than four billion dollars a minute. Still a little difficult to grasp.

Fortunately, the financial markets lost only about seventy million dollars a second. Ah, now that’s a much easier number to understand. 🙂

5 thoughts on “$2,000,000,000,000.00”

  1. Still not good enough. Most people on earth will never see $70 million in their lifetime. You have to ground it in concrete things rather than just leaving it at numbers.

    The One World Trade Center tower cost just under $4 billion to build, just as much as the markets were losing every single minute. The markets lost enough money to build One World Trade nearly five hundred times over.

  2. Well yes, that was my tongue in cheek point. The number is so monstrously huge that even when you divide it down to the second, it is still monstrously huge.

    I like your World Trade Center analogy! 🙂

  3. I think it would also be interesting to know what usual gains and losses are over the course of a day. I’m sure ordinary numbers in global economy land are still extraordinary in our minds.

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