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Earlier this week, the house approved the $700 billion bailout bill. If you assume that there are 300 million Americans, this works out to be $2,333 per person. Of course, not all 300 million Americans are taxpayers. If only half of Americans are taxpayers, this works out to almost $5,000 per person.

What else could you purchase for $700 billion?

The Seattle Mariners play in Safeco Field. It cost about $517 million to build. For $700 billion, you could build 1,354 Safeco Field’s.

The new Freedom Tower in New York City is estimated to cost $3 billion to build. You could build 233 of these for $700 billion.

A dollar bill is 6.14 inches long. 700 billion dollar bills is 4.298 trillion inches in length. This is equal to 67,834,595.95 miles. The distance to the moon is 238,900 miles. This amount is about 284 times farther than the distance from the earth to the moon.

The current price of oil is $93.88/barrel. At this price, the US could buy 7,456,327,226 barrels of oil for $700 billion. The US currently imports 10,031,000 barrels per day. For $700 billion, we could import at our current rate for 743 days without running out of money assuming that the price stays the same.

At $9 per movie ticket, the government could buy each American 259 movie tickets.

A dollar bill is .0043 inches thick. $700 billion worth of dollar bills is 3,010,000,000 inches thick. This is equivalent to 250,833,333 feet or 47,506 miles thick. The Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet tall. You could stand 23,596 Eiffel Towers on top of each other to reach the same height of $700 billion worth of dollar bills. The highest point in the world is Mt. Everest standing at 29,029 feet tall. Even at this staggering height, you would have to stand 8,640 Mt. Everests on top of each other to be the same height as $700 billion worth of dollar bills.

There are plenty of other comparisons I could make to show enormous amount of money that the US is spending to bail out the financial industry. I can think of plenty of other things that the US could spend their money on.

Currency, Economic News, Financial Institutions bailout, banks, financial industry

An article at Marketwatch.com written by Moming Zhou states that Biofuels are to blame for the increase in the cost of food prices world wide. At least that is the argument at the UN food summit in Rome anyway. On the surface this would make a lot of sense given the typical supply and demand theory that we all know and love.

As more and more people are born onto this earth, there becomes a greater and greater demand for food. If food production cannot keep up with demand because some of it is going towards the production of biofuels, then prices will naturally rise. “The U.N. said poor nations are expected to pay 40% more this year to feed their people than they did a year ago, and about 860 million people will be left without adequate food this year.” Statistics show that the usage of food for crops is not headed for a slowdown any time soon. According to the US Department of Agriculture, “corn for ethanol production is expected to reach 4 billion bushels next year, up more than 30% from this year and accounting for nearly 40% of domestic corn consumption.”

Can this massive run up in prices be fully attributed to the production of biofuels though? Major biofuel producing countries like the United States and Brazil don’t necessarily agree. The US admits that “biofuels are to account for a portion of the food-price inflation,” but “the driving factor is energy and increased consumption.” This seems to make sense because of the farming methods that we use. Large tractors and combines surely can’t be very fuel efficient. Given the price of energy these days it is easy to see why prices are rising. Brazil produces ethanol from sugarcane. Brazil also makes a valid argument for why they as well are not to be blamed. Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva argues that “sugarcane isn’t a food staple and the sugarcane crop for ethanol production only accounts for 1% of the country’s arable land.”

You can read the entirety of this article here.

Economic News, Financial Markets biofuels, Brazil, ethanol, food prices, US