Big Money Maths Part 1: The Basics

 So you decide to pay attention to big money. Not the $11.75/hour you can get to stock shelves at some supermarket, or even the $60,000/year the Right Wingers in the USA Congress think is already too much for you. (Even if those same Right Wingers in the USA Congress get about $200,000/year plus the best health insurance plan available plus a wide variety of additional perks and expense accounts.) 

None of those peanuts. You want to look, gaze, and stare at the millions, the billions, and the trillions. The lions, the hippos, and the elephants. But you have heard that accountants must be really good at maths, and financial workers of any sort must be veritable maths wizards. Are you up to the challenge?

Turns out, if you can count with your fingers, you are fully qualified. When it comes to money, modern humans in the planet Earth use a decimal number system, and "decimal" is just a fancy word for "ten". If you want to program computer CPU's you must dig hexadecimals, and if you want to audit the accounts of the Roman Empire, well, you may have to deal with Roman numerals, but if all you care about is dollars and pesos and euros and yen and pounds and riels and rupees and ... it's all in base 10. Keep your shoes on, you won't need your toes. Your 10 fingers are enough.

But, you may say, some  numbers are really big. Much bigger than the number of fingers any genetically modified human may ever hope to grow. How am I ever going to cope with only 10 fingers????

Well, the secret is, when it comes to big money, only the number to the left matters. The next number to the right kind of sometimes matters. That's it. All other figures trying to assault your brain at once just don't matter. All those other extra figures are there just to tell you the size of the numbers that actually matter. Are you looking at lions, or hippos, or elephants, or just mice and lice?

You are totally justified to think that I have lost my mind (or that I am full of s**t). But let's look at an example. Look at the following number:

$ 321

There. The number to the left is a 3, and it tells you that you are looking at about $300. Whether that is enough, or too much, or way too little, it all depends on the frame of reference. Are you trying to buy some snack, or a yacht, or do you really intend to eradicate poverty South of the Equator? In every case, that "3" will tell you will tell you enough to either keep on looking or forget about the whole business altogether. The "2" may come into play only if you are trying to buy some really expensive snack, the kind you really should not even think about if you only have about $300, and the other number, well, who cares! Don't bother with the mice and lice, focus on the hippos and the elephants, or at least the lions.

Do you still fell afraid? Totally justified if you struggled through years and years of maths. But take a breather and then read Part 2 of Big Money Maths. There we will go from 300 to trillions, and you will be ready to deal with the Central European Bank and the Fed and Ali Baba and Amazon and Offshore Money Centers and the Global Public Debt. Though maybe not quite ready to deal with your landlord. There is only so much that Big Money Gazing can do for you.