A Penny For Your Thoughts

 

 

 

There is an old Chinese curse –  “May you live in interesting times.”

As I was sitting back and watching the global banking meltdown of 2008, I was reminded of the “interesting” riddle, or parable, of “Joseph’s Penny,” which clearly indicates why the US and world economies are now trillions of dollars in debt, and, have no way out of complete financial collapse, or the more likely complete economic reorganization, within the next decade.

The riddle goes like this. If, at the time of the birth of Christ, Joseph had invested one penny in a bank, and the bank had given him an annual interest rate return of 5%, how much would be in the account if Jesus returned today to check on the account?

Any idea?

Think big astronomically big.

By now that solitary penny would have, in Canadian dollars, earned $69,945,973,564,748,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00.

Take a moment, or an hour, to comprehend that last sentence. The dollar amount is over 69 thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, dollars.

At $2,555.30 (price per ounce in Canadian dollars as of January 21,2023) that value is equal to 146.53 billion times the mass of the planet earth, in solid .999 gold.

In other words 146 billion planets, the size of the Earth, comprised of solid gold. 

Imagine them stretching out into the universe 

Now, isn’t that just the best example of the magic of compound interest we were all taught in school?

To further stretch your imagination, since the Earth has a diameter of 7,915.5 miles, imagine a trail of gold balls stretching 1.159 quadrillion miles out into the universe, a distance of 197 light years.

This means if you left the Earth now, and traveled at the speed of light, it would be theoretically impossible to travel from here to the end of that trail of gold, since the number of golden planets, and therefore distance, is now increasing faster than the speed of light.

Being a bit of a skeptic, when I first heard the story, I didn’t believe the amounts, so, I prepared an Excel spreadsheet, which confirmed them…I’ve updated it and you can review/check the math

In examining the exponential growth rate of one penny at 5% compounded interest, I noticed that during the first 100 years one cent grew only to $1.25. By 200 AD, it had grown to $164.69. But, by the 300th year, it showed over a 2 million times increase over the original investment of a penny to a total of $21,657.10

Liberal v Conservative finstats

Liberal v Conservative