A designer has to break numbers down into 'points' to make them easy to work with. We don't want to deal with thousands of men, but a strength point, or with two or three millions of pounds, but with a 'Gold.' It's all about 'Ratio.' This is how game designers go about this. They divide by some factor, 1,000, 10,000, 2.3 million, and then you've got a unit, something possible to be grasped. So what about applying this to the recent stock market debacle? In the first week of April, the value of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost 2 trillion dollars. How do we think about that number? A billion is nine zeroes, and a trillion is twelve zeroes. We are talking about '2' followed by twelve zeros. How do we put that number 2,000,000,000,000 in terms that are comprehensible? There was an article in the New Yorker April 3, 2000 issue, about Michael Saylor, the CEO of a high-tech company he founded ten years ago, Micro Strategy. His bookkeeping was a little overoptimistic, and he had to re-evaluate the current business number downward by 6 billion. So the market of course mirrored that downward valuation and his company's stock immediately fell by 6 billion dollars. But this was just a harbinger of things to come. It sounds like a lot of money to say that your company just lost 6 billion dollars. But it would take 334 high-tech companies, all losing 6 billion dollars apiece, to reach the figure of 2 trillion. There are only 3600 companies on the NY Stock Exchange; it's a finite Universe. The equivalent of almost one in ten have lost 6 billion each, and 100 companies suffered the bulk of the loss. Even after this adjustment, the price-to-earnings ratio on the NYSE was 29:1, and the total value of all the stocks on the NYSE was something like 20 trillion dollars. To reduce this all down to comprehensible terms, let's make an AP equal to what it costs to run the US government for one day. The budget for this year is 1.79 trillion, so divide that by 365; each day the government spends 4.9 billion dollars. The US government spends 365 APs a year, or 30 APs a month. The market just lost about 2000 billion dollars, (408 APs) enough to run the US government for one year, one month, and a fortnight; or to pay-off one third the national debt, currently 5.6 trillion dollars (1143 APs). Back to OSG News May 2000 Table of Contents Back to OSG News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Operational Studies Group. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com