The multinational insurance giant AIG reported massive losses for Q4/08: 61.7 billion US dollars.

If that looks like a big number, think again: AIG has already received 150 billion USD, plus is about to receive 30 billion USD extra as bail-out/rescue/emergency funding. All in all this is 180 billion USD, almost three times the losses.

That’s… massive. But how much money is it, really?

If you had this money in one dollar notes, and carefully taped the short sides together, at 15.5956 cm length per note, it would form a 2.87*10¹⁰ m long chain. Considering that the average center-to-center distance from Earth to the Moon is about 384403 km, this would be enough to take the resulting chain all the way to the Moon and back 36 times - and you’d still have some money over to buy a mansion.

If you stacked the dollar bills, it would form a pile over 19600 km high. At about 8.848 km a pop, this is higher than over 2200 Mount Everests stacked on top of each other.

How and where do they store this huge mountain of money, then? Well, nowhere. It doesn’t really exist. It’s just numbers inside a computer!