a pointless math exercise.
That post about the guy trying to cash a $360 billion check had me wondering how much paper we’re talking about when we fling numbers of that size around.
Because they’re all the same size, all U.S. bills are the same weight, just a hair under one gram, or 0.03 ounces.
A billion dollars of cash in the largest possible denomination ($100), would weigh 10,ooo,ooo grams, or 10,000 kilograms–ten metric tons.
Three hundred and sixty billion dollars in $100 bills would therefore weigh three thousand six hundred metric tons, which is almost four thousand short tons–eight million pounds of paper money.
That’s a bunch of weight. Your average American tractor trailer can haul a maximum of roughly forty short tons, which means that you would need 99 tractor trailers to haul three hundred and sixty billion dollars in cash, give or take a trailer or two.
I’m almost entirely sure that our criminal mastermind genius pulled up to that bank in something less than a convoy of ninety-nine big rigs.
May 4, 2008 at 2:26 am
Excellent analysis. Except that U.S. currency is printed on cotton, not paper.
May 4, 2008 at 7:29 am
I believe that if you do the math on volume, rather than weight, you’ll find he’d need even more. He would (as the saying goes in the shipping industry) “bulk out before he’d gross out”. Poorly stacked paper occupies a lot of volume, but I’ll grant that well stacked paper (like reams of photocopy paper) might be dense enough to gross out as well.
May 4, 2008 at 7:31 am
I believe that if you do the math on volume, rather than weight, you’ll find he’d need even more. He would (as the saying goes in the shipping industry) “bulk out before he’d gross out”. Poorly stacked paper occupies a lot of volume, but I’ll grant that well stacked paper (like reams of photocopy paper) might be dense enough to gross out as well.
May 4, 2008 at 7:36 am
ibex,
technically, it’s a paper-cotton blend, but I was using “paper money” in the common parlance sort of way.
May 4, 2008 at 8:16 am
Oh. Thanks. You learn something new every day.
May 4, 2008 at 8:46 am
Remember Way of the Gun?
“I get the feeling you haven’t thought this through.”
May 4, 2008 at 1:29 pm
That’s the teller’s first clue… of course it’s counterfeit, he didn’t bring a big enough bag
That’s his lawyer’s first defense… of course he’s insane, he didn’t bring a big enough bag
May 4, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I’d be happy if I could have one semitrail of 100 dollar bills.
I guess he just got greedy.
May 5, 2008 at 8:35 am
My guess is he would tip the weight before volume became a problem. I used to work for a company that imported/shipped copy paper, and generally we would have space in every truck after max pallet weight was hit. If it was a reefer, we would even be a pallet short.
Fun fact: most printer paper is exactly the same, and the fancy name brands and store brands are made at the same plant out of the same stuff. Only the printing on the box is different (assuming the same weight paper, etc.)