Let’s say some very wealthy individual had access to the treasury and at some point in time was able to finagle the printing of a 1-Trillion dollar bill.
Let’s also pretend that he has willed the treasury note to you, with the caveat that in order to use the money you must first “make change with it”. The stipulation is that you must have “at one time and in one location” enough cold hard cash to break the bill. Once broken, of course, you could pay, with said cash, the services of the people and institutions that were involved in helping you with the transaction.
How would you go about doing this? And, in your opinion is it even possible?
Yes, it is certainly possible, but for what are clearly obvious reasons it would have to happen on a Tuesday, sometime between 3:10 and 3:45pm, Mountain Standard Time.
I get in touch with the treasury contact that printed up the trillion dollar bill and “finagle” him to print up a million million-dollar bills. He’s certainly able to do so; he managed to print the trillion-dollar one after all. In return for him doing it I promise to give him one of them. And I do! I’m an honest guy and can certainly afford it.
After that, of course, I’m free to deposit all the others in some very happy bank.
Are you getting kickbacks from the printer? Why not two 500-billion dollar bills? Or one 990-billion dollar bill and ten 1-billion dollar billion bills so you can leave a tip.
I figured that trying to get banks to accept bills larger than a million dollars each might be asking a lot of them - but maybe it wouldn’t be? In any case once you realize that somebody printed the BIG bill, finding other slightly-less-big bills, whichever slightly-less-big bills you choose, becomes a viable approach to the problem.
Whoops, forgot to check the small print…
“monies used to make change must be currently in circulation, idiot!”
Says right on the back of the will and trust.
Wait…I have to make change with it or whoever I’m buying something with the bill has to make change with it? I’m unsure what you are getting at.
If I have to make change with it, then there is no way…not unless I can get the treasury guy to make other bills (leaving aside that there is no wealthy person who currently has anywhere close to a trillion dollars to will to anyone, bill or no bill). If I can get some other entity to make change after a purchase, well, I’m pretty sure I could buy something from some large corporation and have them give me change for the remainder in cash (like, oh, say a manned Mars mission plus space station, give me a few billion in change, thanx!), though that would be kind of awkward even if my change was only a few billion dollars. I can’t even think of what I might want to buy that could reasonably use a trillion dollar bill…hell, I’d be hard pressed to think of what I might reasonably buy for a few billion dollars or a $10 billion dollar bill, let alone a trillion dollar one. I’m not sure if you understand how much that actually is…that’s more than the GDP of most countries (I think only the top 10 or so national GDPs are over a trillion dollars…I think Canada is only something like $1.5 trillion).
I just figured in my imaginary world I was saving the imaginary forests. Imaginary-world global warming is anthropogenic, just like regular-world global warming. And I’m fully behind President Clinton in implementing her environmental policy.
Well, according to this, there’s only about 6 trillion dollars worth of cash and coin worldwide, and while I’m admittedly can’t prove it I think it’s pretty probable that no single person or party is in possession of a sixth of it all. This would meant that if we’re limited to finding a single person or party who can give us our bill’s worth in currently-in-curculation cash we’re probably out of luck.
Now admittedly you could try to coordinate a worldwide effort to collect that much cash in one place, with all the parties that currently holding it splitting whatever reward you’re offering to make this happen, but I suspect the logistical hurdles of that would be sufficiently steep that it would never come to pass. Starting with the fact that I’m sure most of the cash is in the possession of people with so little cash that their portion of the reward wouldn’t be worth bringing their wallet to the party (which would have to be at a single consolidated physical place, remember). You can’t offer them better than dollar-for-dollar for the cash they bring, after all.
It’s not remotely possible. There is only $1.72 trillion of US currency in circulation.
According to HowStuffWorks, that amount is divided between the US and the rest of the world. So the entire US doesn’t have a trillion dollars in cash, much less any single place.
I’m a bit doubtful that there’s a billion in cash in any one place, for that matter. The Fed does call in $200 billionor so in old money each year to be destroyed, with replacement bills being printed, so there might be $1 billion around at a time, assuming it’s all done in one location. So maybe, possibly. A trillion in one place? No. Not even theoretically without comic-book level assumptions.