A Trillion Malaysian Ringgit in Bank Notes

Soon after the new government of Malaysia won the last election, Tun Dr Mahathir, the new Prime Minister told on television that under the last Barisan National government, Malaysia went into debt to a tune of one trillion ringgit.

A lot of people through Whatsapp and social media then tried to visualize how much is a trillion ringgit? Very often I get Whatsapp messages into my smart phone from people talking  about a trillion ringgit in debt.

That is a lot of money, and I too tried to visualize where and how to store all those money even we have them.  

So I decided to try to illustrate how much is one trillion ringgit just for academic interest and for fun.

In order to imagine how much a trillion ringgit this country has lost under the previous government, I actually made a measurement using a Harpenden skinfold caliper to measure the thickness of RM 1 note.

Materials and Methods:

This instrument is a highly accurate and reliable instrument used by nutritionists in their anthropometric and clinical examinations to measure skin fold and body fats as one of the modalities to assess nutritional status in a population.

The instrument exerts a constant pressure of exactly 10 gm per square mm with a measuring range of 0 mm to 80 mm. It has an accuracy of 99.5 % and a reproducibility of 0.20 mm. It can also be used to measure anything as thin as just 0.20 mm.


So we will also use the Harpenden skinfold caliper to measure the thickness of a single RM 1 bank note  

Let us see how it works.

I took five bundles of brand new RM 1 notes, each bundle containing RM 100 and made 20 random site measurements on each bundle. The five bundles of RM 1 currency notes measure a thickness of +/ 10.01 mm each. We can take it that, each RM 1 note is 0.1 mm thick. 

Results and Discussions:

Now let us see how thick is a column of RM 1 trillion (1 x 10 ¹²) or 1 followed by 12 zeros RM 1 notes?

Since there are 1,000,000 mm in a kilometer, a  trillion ringgit at 0.1 mm each if placed together horizontally under a constant pressure of 10 gm per square mm all through between each RM  1 notes will extend to 100,000 km. That’s an awful lot in distance.

A Journey through the Bank Notes:

A commercial jet plane flying at a speed of say 850 kph non-stop , will take 117.647 hours or 4 days 15 hours 32 minutes to fly across  all those one trillion ringgit bank notes.  That is a very, very long distance.  

The flight time between Kuala Lumpur International Airport and London Heathrow Airport over a distance of 10,599 km is only about 13.5 hours at a slower average speed of 785 kph.

A Much Longer Yardstick:

The greatest equatorial circumference of Earth is 40075.017 km. This means RM 1 trillion in RM1 notes will have to circle the Earth’s equator 2.495 times. Wow! That’s a lot of bank notes.  

Into Outer Space:

However, we cannot stack them all up vertically to find out how high it would extend out into outer space because of the immense weight and pressure all those notes will exert at the bottom of the column due to gravity, let alone very strong and high winds at high altitudes that will blow away all the notes. So we need to stack them horizontally to minimize gravity due to structural engineering reasons.

But let us assume in theory at least, we are able to stack them all up vertically, all those brand new RM 1 trillion notes into space. They will then extend up to 0.26 times the distance between the Earth and the  Moon.  The average Earth - Moon distance is 384,400 km. 

A Much Faster Yardstick:

The speed of light in vacuum is 299,792 kilometers per second. If a beam of light were to travel all through the column of RM 1 trillion in RM 1 notes, it will still take 0.33 seconds which is the time it will take to blink an eye, compared to 1.28 seconds for light to travel from the Moon to Earth.

But of course Malaysia does not stack up her national wealth all in RM 1 notes. No country stores only bank notes either. We can have the money in bigger denomination such as in RM 10, RM 50 and RM 100 notes.  Even that is an awful lot of cash to store.

The wealth of a country can be measured by her gold reserve, or other assets like in agriculture, manufacturing, industries, trade, commerce, and other productivity, etc. Not all are in trillions of bank notes.

What an awful lot of bank notes of One Trillion Malaysian Ringgit