My idea for this thread is to assemble all the factoids and statistics that one comes across in reading, ones that don't require a context to be interesting and/or impressive, and that are worth taking note of and (if possible) remembering.
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From Jan Michael Greer: the world derivative market has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion dollars. The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom may well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that costs you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn’t yet have spent one quadrillion dollars.)
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From George Monbiot: The government wrings its hands about the potential loss of revenue. But in the year before the crash the entire financial sector (of which the City of London is just a sub-station) generated only £12.4bn a year in corporation tax. According the Office for National Statistics, the government’s interventions in the financial markets have already added £141 billion to public sector net debt. Its potential liability is £1.2 trillion. It would take, in other words, between 12 and 97 years for the government to recoup the money it has given to the banks, assuming that its failure to regulate doesn’t result in another bail-out in a few years’ time. The City of London is a net drain on public accounts.
