A Billion Dollar Dilemma

by Peter Geiger | Friday, January 9th, 2009 | From: Farmers' Almanac Blog

When I was growing up in the early 1960s, being a millionaire was the ultimate accomplishment in life. Wow – a million dollars and your life was set. Then the “b” word started to creep into discussions. Senator Everett Dirksen is quotes as saying ” A billion here. a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money”. The good Senator died in 1969 when a billion was still quite something. It was an amount so large it was difficult to fathom.

Soon after I started working at the Farmers’ Almanac. We ran a piece about how much money $1,000,000,000 billion really was. As we start to kick around hundreds of billions and now, trillions of dollars, I am reprinting our observation from 35 years ago.

What is a Billion Dollars(1974 edition)

It has been calculated that if you had been able to borrow a billion dollars, interest free, and paid it back at one thousand dollars a day with the last payment made sometime during the year 1973, your original loan would have been made the year 772 B.C.

Can you imagine the amount of debt and the time it takes to pay it all back with interest when you start talking about trillions? Yikes

Peter Geiger is the Editor of the Farmers' Almanac. Read his full biography here.

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