Don't get me wrong, it is still a lot of money. I have no idea (and probably never will) what having that kind of money would be like and when a lot of thought is put into it, a billion dollars is a whole whack of cash.
But I'm talking about the bigger picture. When I hear that a company is worth $1.7B, I think to myself, "Oh, it's only $1.7B. That's not too big." Or even when I hear that the Big Three are losing tens of billions of dollars; it just doesn't hit me as hard as it once might have.
So why is this happening in my crazy ol' mind? I think it has to do with the amount of money being thrown around in this economic crisis. Remember the much-heralded $700B bailout plan that was the talk of the town for so many weeks? I wouldn't be surprised if you forgot about it. Because apparently it wasn't enough. There were other bailout plans passed through, some in the $200B range, but even those don't seem all that big anymore. Compared to $700B, $200B is just a tack-on.
Once it became known that $700B wasn't nearly enough to fix everything, the notional value of a billion fell off the map. With these absolutely ridiculous dollar figures being thrown around daily on the news, it's not hard to imagine why the lesser figures aren't as meaningful anymore. Remember when hearing that Bill Gates had $50B or something silly like that? That ain't nothin' in my head now, at least in comparison to everything else.
It's strange. A billion dollars is a lot of money. But it just doesn't have that same ring to it. Who would've thunk it?
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