The United States debt currently stands at around $14,000,000,000,000.
Put into words, it is about $14, thousand billion, or in the language of Dr Evil, the hapless character in the Austin Powers movies: $14 Trillion dollars- (cue evil laugh)
One of the things we have speculated about, is what the rise in the price of gold would do to countries national debt.
For some, like Italy, it would have had a significant impact, while others such as the UK and the USA, it would be negligible.
Today, in their chart of the week, The Atlantic has put the US debt into perspective. From the article:
One takeaway from this exercise is to show how little impact the U.S.'s gold reserves would make in paying down the debt. The U.S. government has around 21.7 million pounds of gold. That might sound like a lot, but it would take 808.0 million pounds of gold to pay off the debt. Even if the U.S. government put every once of its gold towards paying down the debt, it would pay down less than 3%.
