Just recently, U.S. consumer debt (that’s everything except mortgages) hit $16 trillion. Of course, that fact is often buried in the fine print, where most of us don’t pay attention. Or, if we do, we have no idea what that means.
So what is a trillion? It’s a million million, a thousand billion or 1,000,000,000,000.
A billion is a thousand million, or 1,000,000,000.
A billion seconds ago, it was 1991. A billion minutes ago, it was the year 121 A.D. A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. But a billion dollars ago in consumer debt was just about two weeks!…