Millions, Billions, Trillions: Perspective on the Numbers from a Lottery Expert

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- We've been reading less about
"millions" lately, and more about "billions" and "trillions," concerning the
Federal government's bailout of the financial system. As a former stockbroker
and now as a stock investor and professional lottery numbers cruncher, Gail
Howard, author of Lottery Master Guide, and other books, is a numbers devotee
(www.smartluck.com). Everyone knows that billions and trillions add up to a
lot of money, but it's easy to lose perspective on the size of these amounts:
-- A thousand thousands is one million: 1,000,000.
-- A thousand millions is one billion: 1,000,000,000.
-- A thousand billions is one trillion: 1,000,000,000,000.

"If you won a billion-dollar lottery that paid you one million dollars a
day, you'd collect the entire sum in two and a half years. If you won a
trillion-dollar lottery that paid you one million dollars a day, you'd be dead
before you collected your entire jackpot because it would take 2,739 years to
get it," says Howard.
In a March 23, 2006, New York Times column, Bob Herbert described the
numbers graphically: imagine a stack of mostly $1,000-dollar bills reaching
six inches, totaling $1 million. If this stack were enlarged to $1 billion,
it would reach the top of the Washington Monument. If it grew to $1 trillion,
the stack would be 95 miles high.
To bail out the financial system, the government has pledged $7.76
trillion in taxpayer money. For point of comparison, consider these numbers:
-- The Gross Domestic Product of the United States is $14 trillion.
-- The Gross Domestic Product of the entire world is $50 trillion.
-- The real estate of the entire world is valued at $75 trillion.

Credit default swaps were bundled and sold worldwide as highly rated
investment vehicles. The amount outstanding of these and other unregulated
financial derivatives is $1,144 trillion (or $1.144 quadrillion), which is 22
times the GDP of the entire world, according to the Bank for International
Settlements in Switzerland.
"This financial crisis is not about sub-prime mortgages or credit swaps,"
says Tom Foremski of the Business Network. "The geniuses of Wall Street have
managed to create a bubble that is way beyond any real values."
"Taxpayers are forcibly being burdened with an inconceivable $7 trillion
debt to pay for the failure of Wall Street's wild speculative rampage," says
Howard.
Contact: Gail Howard (702)365-9270
SOURCE Smart Luck Publishing and Software

Gail Howard, +1-702-365-9270