How much is $700 billion?

My colleague, Steve Mullis, is putting together some graphical depictions of how much $700 billion is — the current estimated amount of the big financial bailout being debated in Congress. This isn’t one of them, but this is the largest bill in U.S. currency. $100,000.

It would take 7 million of these to make up $700 billion. These bills are not in circulation. And, besides, only 42,000 of these were printed.

So we’d have to use these:

We’d need 7 billion of them, of course. Each bill weighs one gram. Four-hundred-fifty-four bills equals one pound. So $700 billion in $100 bills weighs 15,418,502 pounds — 7,709 tons.

At current weight limits, it would take 24 51 railroad freight cars to deliver the cash.