by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
A trillion dollars is a lot of money. If you stacked a billion dollar bills on top of one another, the pile would be 67.9 miles high, but if you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of one another the pile would be 67,866 miles high. And if you lined up a trillion dollar bills end to end, the line of dollar bills would be a staggering 96,906,656 miles long. That is longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. A trillion dollars is such a vast amount of money that it is truly difficult to comprehend, but as you will see below, that much money has already been pulled out of “vulnerable” U.S. banks over the past year. Hordes of small and mid-size banks are now in trouble, and that is really bad news because those institutions issue most of the mortgages, auto loans and credit cards that our economy runs on. The other day, I asked my readers to “imagine what our country will look like if the banking system implodes and the economy plunges into a depression”, because if our banks continue to collapse that is precisely where we are headed.
The dozen-or-so “atmospheric rivers,” also known as rain storms, that have hit California this winter so far have provided a much-needed reprieve from the persistent drought conditions that have plagued the state for many years. There is a downside, though: many of the state’s crop farms are now underwater from all this excess moisture, which is creating massive food and finance losses for the Golden State’s farmers.
