Japan’s soaring national debt, already more than twice the size of its economy, has reached a new milestone, surpassing one quadrillion yen.
Let the word quadrillion roll around in your brain for a moment or two, because it is not something you hear every day. Quadrillion. 1,000,000,000,000,000. Really.
A paltry million is the numeral one followed by six zeros. A billion? Nine zeros. A trillion is getting up there: 12 zeros. But the mighty quadrillion has 15 of them.
The mind boggles. (Though it doesn’t googol: that one is followed by 100 zeros. And that’s the actual spelling. You can Google it.)
A quadrillion is a million billion, putting it into the kind of language used by middle schoolers to describe really humongous sums, along with gazillion and bazillion.
Measuring any currency in quadrillions brings to mind the hyperinflation of Germany between the wars, or Zimbabwe in the last decade. But a country with a real currency?
It is such a big and unusual word, describing such a big and unusual number, that its use is inconsistent: Bloomberg News used quadrillion in the headline of an early story on Friday about Japan’s debt, but later in the day the stories and headlines referred to a “thousand trillion,” which is not nearly as much fun.
Questions e-mailed to the Bloomberg editors responsible for those stories were not returned, suggesting perhaps a lexicographical quadrilliongate.
How much is a quadrillion? The entire human body is said to have just 100 trillion cells; it takes 10 of us to make a quadrillion. Jeff Bezos has a personal fortune of some $25 billion, allowing him to plunk down $250 million for The Washington Post, which is essentially how much money he might find by looking behind his sofa cushions. To get to a quadrillion dollars, however, we would have to have 40,000 Bezoses, or as many people as live in Prescott, Ariz.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, helpfully offered a few other ways to think about a quadrillion. “It would take you 31 million years to count to a quadrillion — one number per second, never sleeping,” he said in an e-mail, adding that “a quadrillion yen, stacked in 1,000-yen notes, would ascend 70,000 miles high.”
He also wrote, though it is not clear how he would know such a thing, that “the total number of all sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived is about 100 quadrillion.”
“This figure includes all Congressional debates and filibusters,” Mr. Tyson wrote.
Compared with Japan, the United States national debt is a mere $16 trillion or so. But if you convert that number into yen, it comes to about 1.5 quadrillion. So it’s good to have a currency that conserves its zeros. Of course, that also means the total American debt is even larger than Japan’s (though not, it should be noted, as a percentage of gross domestic product).
Hmm. Let’s not talk about that.
日本国家债务首超千万亿日元
12/08/2013 |朝日新闻
日本财务省8月9日公布，截至今年6月末，日本的国家债务达1008.6281万亿日元（约合人民币64.46万亿元），首次突破了1000万亿日元大关。相当于年度国内生产总值(GDP)的近2倍，计算下来国民人均债务额为800万日元（约合人民币50.8万元）。
安倍政权提出了积极财政等经济对策，因此债务规模增加，与3月末约991万亿日元相比增加了约17万亿日元。
其中，政府为了让金融机构等投资方出钱而发行的“国债”余额约为830万亿日元。来自金融机构等直接融资的“借款”约为55万亿日元。政府介入汇兑时为满足资金需求而向金融机构等发行的“政府短期证券”约为123万亿日元。
经历过泡沫经济崩溃后90年代末的经济刺激对策、2008年秋季雷曼危机后的经济对策以及因老龄化而增加社会保障预算等原因，使日本政府的债务规模逐年膨胀。据财务省推算，本年度的财政预算总额为92.6万亿日元，其中42.8万亿日元来自国债。到2013年度末，政府债务余额预计将增至1107万亿日元。
