The following set of pictures, using $100 notes, shows progressively increasing amounts of money, and how physically large these amounts are.
$100
$10,00
$1 million
£100,000,000
$1,000,000,000 ($1 billion dollars)
Try and imagine (if you can) what $186 billion (£120 billion) might look like?
Our largest denomination is a £50 note, so a billion pounds would be twenty (20) pallets. So £120 billion would be 2,400 pallets of money. In March 2013 Britain borrowed £15.1 billion (302 pallets worth), which is £5,825 per second. However, this was actually down from £16.7 billion in March 2012. The media talk abouts billions and trillions as if they are somehow insignificant, they are not, a billion pounds is a staggering amount of money – twenty pallets of £50 notes, shoulder high to an adult.
Follow this link to see what a trillion dollars looks like. The dollar:pound exchange rate used is 1.5:1 so to imagine what these $100 amounts would need to be to represent the equivalents in pounds, you need to add 50% to these amounts. So a £billion would be $1.5billion, or 15 pallets.
The picture below explains what some (not all) of our (UK) commitments look like using $100 bills.
What the image above represents is the UK’s current debt level ($1.61 trillion) and what this would look like if represented as $100 notes, each block in the towers and on the truck represents a pallet holding $100 million in $100 denominations. Each fully laden lorry carries $2 billion, representing the amount of interest the UK will pay, a total of $67 billion. The tower on the red block represents government loan repayments in 2012 amounting to $165 billion. The tower on the yellow block represents government loan repayments to be repaid in the future, amounting to $1.379 trillion.
This amazing image and many others which explain the Worlds current financial predicament can be found at demonocracy.inf
UK has a large economy of $2.480 trillion USD, but now holds debt of 75% of economy, which is more than the 60% max debt to economy ratio set by EU for economic stability standard.
In February 2013, UK lost its AAA credit rating.
High debt slows economic growth and it is reflected in the slow 0.9% growth of economy in 2011, which is much lower than the 4.2% inflation – meaning people of UK are becoming more poor as of 2011/2012.
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