Inflation and Large Numbers

Turn on the news, and very rapidly, you’ll be informed of the size of government debt, the percentage of inflation and the amount of money spent or some other alarming dystopian number relevant to a story that is driving the click-baiting media machine.

We are all somewhat de-sensitised to it when these large numbers are constantly quoted. In a recent survey, people were asked if they understood the size of specific numbers. Here is how the survey worked.

The question was asked, “Give me a gut reaction without calculating the following questions”.

1. How long ago, was one million seconds?
2. How long ago was one billion seconds?
3. How long ago was one trillion seconds?

Apart from the clever dicks that said, ‘it was one million billion and trillion seconds ago”, and understood to answer the question with a different relative time format. Over 83% of those surveyed placed relatively marginal differences between the three.

Here are the answers :

1. Eleven days thirteen hours, forty-six minutes and forty seconds.
2. Over thirty-one and a half years!
3. Over thirty-one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight years ago, the ice age !!!!!

When you hear on the news that the spending plan is XYZ billion and the debt is ABC Trillion, try to fathom the reality of these numbers.

What does this mean for us? Inflation. We won’t be telling you anything new when we underline that hyperinflation is here; in our opinion, it will be here for a long while!

It means, now more than ever, you MUST gain meaningful growth on your money, or it will disappear! In the same way that when you take a plane ride and as you are rolling the runway, if you look out the window you could pick out and focus on the blades of grass next as they rush by. As you leave the ground and gain altitude, they rapidly disappear from your view, so will your savings unless you at least keep up with inflation.