The Trillion Dollar Bill

A few months ago, I did the most amazing thing. I printed out a green piece of paper with the numbers $1,000,000,000,000 stamped on it. (For those having trouble counting zeroes, that's One Trillion Dollars.) It looked just like a genuine trillion dollar bill.

In fact, it was so good, all the area banks agreed too that it was just like a genuine trillion dollar bill. I asked for a loan against it and all of the banks were more than happy to oblige. They were practically falling over each other to loan me money.

Of course, the interest payments were huge! To help make the payments, I loaned some of the money I got from the banks to others.

I had so much money I needed to loan that I just gave it out without a whole lot of thought. I hired a ton of people to help me loan the money out and didn't give them a whole lot of instruction except that I'd give bonuses to the people who loaned the most, I didn't care how. They gave it to people I didn't know very well. They even went so far as to talk people into taking a loan when they didn't even need it. Most of these people, just to make sure they were good for it, gave us some green slips of paper too so I could use it as collateral. The slips of paper looked OK and my loan agents said they were fine so I knew they were good. They were about the same as my trillion dollar bill with just a few less zeroes in it. It was all legit. I even compared their bills to mine and wow, the similarities were amazing. It was almost as if they got them the same way I did.

The whole thing was a win-win situation. I was making money, other people were making money, the banks were making money. The economy in the area was boosted significantly of course. A trillion dollars is a lot of dough. The influx of capital was doing wonderful things. Even the CEO's of the banks were getting rich. Most of them took some of the payments I was making and bought really nice homes and cars and other expensive baubles. It was a lot of fun!

Some of the people I loaned the money to decided to upgrade their houses. Wow, it was amazing. The houses were selling like crazy. There were so many people with so much extra money in the area (which I'd given them as loans), that the houses that were selling for $100K before were now selling for $400K and $500K. The economy was screaming. Real Estate values shot up into the stratosphere. People were coming from all over to get loans and buy houses.

Some of the people that bought houses early got more loans against the equity in their houses and bought more stuff and in some cases, another home. Spending was rampant. There was just so much money around it was insane.

Then something happened. Some of these people who bought these homes and took out loans ran out of money. Some of them couldn't make the payments on the loans they had. When those people couldn't make payments to me. I became really strapped for cash.

I had no choice but to take the green slips of paper with the numbers from the borrowers and cash them in. Some people took them and that helped. After a while though, those places stopped taking them and then others stopped. Pretty soon, no one would take them from me. Even the houses these people had weren't worth what the loans were for so I couldn't even use those. Now even I couldn't make my own interest payments to the banks.

I had no choice, I took my crispy trillion dollar bill to the banks and gave it to them. They tried to use it and some, for a short time, took it. Someone spread a rumor that it wasn't worth anything and so the banks stopped taking it. The other banks got nervous and wanted their money but all these banks had was the crispy bill I'd given them and the other banks wouldn't take them. They panicked and started contemplating closing their doors. The local economy was in a shambles. Everything started to come crashing down.

Thankfully, the government thought this economy was special. They couldn't allow a TRILLION dollar economy to just evaporate. There were thousands of jobs alone in this economy that did nothing but handle these crispy green slips of paper I got from all the other people that I loaned money to. What would these people do? Hundreds if not thousands of other jobs were there buying and selling all the real estate. There were even more people that worked to help keep track of my crispy trillion dollar bill. The jobs couldn't just go away. Imagine the ramifications?

So, to help things out, the CEO's of all the major banks got together and hand delivered the crispy trillion dollar bill I gave them. Amazingly, the government cashed it. They didn't think it was as crispy as it should be and the shade of green was a bit off but the risk to the economy was just too great so they cashed it. The government gave a trillion dollars to the banks in exchange for my loan, the loans I made, and all the loans on the houses. The funny thing is, no one can make the loan payments still.

The CEO's were initially concerned but the government didn't seem to bring up their extravagant lifestyles. They didn't even give them a course in detecting counterfeit bills. The government just asked them politely to not make the same mistake again. They said they'd check back in about 50 years to make sure they didn't have any more crispy trillion dollar bills.

I guess they didn't want to burden them with too many rules. It's a free market they said. It worked before, it works now, it should still work. Why mess with something that works they said? The healthcare system has done it for years and it seems to be fine so why mess with the banks?

Sadly, the crispy bill really isn't worth that much. The government kind of knew that though. They have lots of these types of bills. They've even made up a few of their own. With millions and millions of people in the country, its only a few extra dollars in taxes per person so it isn't a big deal.

So, while the CEO's sat around on the beaches of their private islands printing up some bills of their own and reminiscing about how they almost lost it all, the government posted the crispy trillion dollar bill on eBay.

Bidding starts at a dollar. Any takers?