Money fast facts

The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.

If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.

A million dollars’ worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb).

One million dollars’ worth of one-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.

TIP is the acronym for “To Insure Promptness.”

In gambling language, for a gambling house a “sure-thing” is a wager that a player has little chance of winning; “easy money” is their profit from an inexperienced bettor, an unlucky player is called a “stiff.”

The term “smart money” refers to gamblers who have inside information or have arranged a fix, the gambling term for insuring the outcome of an event by illegal methods.

Small-time gamblers who place small bet in order to prolong the excitement of a game are called “dead fish” by game operators because the longer the playing time, the greater the chances of losing.

The term “Blue Chip” comes from the color of the poker chip with the highest value, blue.

Nessie, the Loch Ness monster is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason – Nessie is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism.

Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats
and sugar substitutes.

In 1920, the annual spend on advertising in the US was $2.4 billion; in 1960 it was $11.9 billion; in 2000, $247.7 billion. In 2010 it had grown to $412 billion.

Annual global spending on education is $1.1 trillion. Annual global spending on military is $1.3 trillion (45% by USA).

US and European expenditure on pet food is $17 billion per year.

The global expenditure on health care and nutrition is $2.1 trillion.

In 1998, US states spent $30 billion in funds on correctional services and $24 billion on social welfare.

Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.

In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period. The wood notes came in $1, $5 and $10 values.

The world’s largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about
a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500.

The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.

About 30% of consumers use their credit card as their main means of buying Christmas goodies, 70% do not save to buy Christmas gifts and 86% of consumers do their Christmas shopping during December.

Excessive use of credit is cited as a major cause of non-business bankruptcy, second only to unemployment.

Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.

In the 1400s, global income rose only 0,1% per year; in the 20th Century and early 21st Century it often topped 5% – until the Great Recession of 2008/2009.

The average age of Forbes’s 400 wealthiest individuals is over 60.

In 1955, the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap.

Liliane Bettencourt, the daughter of L’Oreal’s founder, has been the richest woman in the world for most of the past decade.

Queen Elizabeth II is one of the 10th wealthiest women in the world.

The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock.

Australians are the heaviest gamblers in the world; an estimated 82% of Australians bet. That is twice as much per capita as Europeans or Americans. Yet, Australia, with less than 1% of the world population, has 20% of the world’s poker machines.

There are more than 9 million millionaires and about 800 billionaires in the world – depending on how the stock market did today.

80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.

In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930. In 2009 it reached $1,000 per ounce.

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year – about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth.

In 1965, CEOs earned on average 44 times more than factory workers. In 1998, CEOs earned on average 326 times more than factory workers and in 1999, they earned 419 times more than factory workers. The gap has remained more-or-less at 400 times.

The income gap between the richest fifth of the world’s people and the poorest measured by average national income per head increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1998.

Between 1998 and 2005, two thirds of U.S. corporations and 68% of foreign corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

A third of the world’s people live on less than $2 a day, with 1,2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.

In the 17th century, wool fabrics accounted for about two-thirds of England’s foreign trade. Today, the leading wool
producers are Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and China.

The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.

In 1990, the word “recession” appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.

Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.

Tourism is the world’s biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.

In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide
recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

The history of money begins around 2500 years ago with the first minting of coinage in about the seventh to sixth century BC.[1] Money is any clearly identifiable object of value that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts within a market or which is legal tender within a country.

Since ancient times people have swapped items of value either in the exchange of gifts or else in markets where a commonly shared system of tokens is more convenient.[2]

Many things have been exchanged in markets including, for example, livestock and sacks of cereal grain (from which the Shekel is derived) – things directly useful in themselves, but also sometimes merely attractive items such as cowry shells or beads were exchanged for more useful commodities. Precious metals from which early coins were made, fall into this second category.

Numismatics is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms.

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