“What is a trillion”, my seven year old asked while listening to the radio yesterday.

I paused and said, “Well a trillion is 1000 Billion”. His next questions didn’t register because the notion of a Trillion was already pinballing around my tiny brain. One trillion is this number; 1,000,000,000,000. I learned today that it would take 31,709 years to count by ones to 1 trillion. Trivia point; a Googol, the name sake of Google, is a number with 100 zeros. Anyway, there aren’t many things that can be counted in trillions. We really have to turn back to nature and the very raw roots of the globe to begin finding things capable of being counted in trillions, like snails and trees and sand and grass and dirt. There are not 1 trillion humans on earth and despite how it may feel at rush hour in the city, there are not 1 trillion cars on earth. We cannot find 1 trillion buildings on earth. However, I’m guessing that the word “Depression” has been use at least 1 trillion times in the media, since last Thursday and we do somehow have maybe $7 Trillon US dollars to spend. Rest assured I will not step in the political goo of bail out policy effectiveness in this discussion. Rather, I will stick to the concept of trillions of dollars and build on my commodity theme of last week.