Boards
North Korea Demands More Money Than Actually Exists on Planet Earth.
"SEOUL: Cash-strapped North Korea demanded on Thursday that the United States pay almost $65 trillion in compensation for six decades of hostility.
The cost of the damage done by the United States since the peninsula was divided in 1945 is estimated at $64.96 trillion, the official news agency said, in a report on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War.
The figure includes $26.1 trillion arising from US "atrocities" which left more than five million North Koreans dead, wounded, kidnapped or missing, KCNA said.
Six decades of US sanctions had caused a loss of $13.7 trillion by 2005 while property losses were estimated at $16.7 dollars, said the agency which also listed a large number of smaller claims.
North Koreans have "the justifiable right" to receive the compensation for their blood, it said.
The war started on June 25, 1950, with a North Korean invasion approved by the then-Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
The Communist country insists that South Korea and its US ally instigated the conflict, in which a US-led United Nations force fought for the South and China backed the North.
The war left 1.23 million people dead and 2.46 million wounded in the North, the news agency said, citing a state committee which assessed the damage.
Independent casualty estimates vary greatly but most say that a total of some two million civilians died in the North and the South along with 215,000 North Korean troops.
The fighting left the peninsula in ruins. The North suffered huge damage from US bombing raids.
The agency said the committee's calculation did not include the damage North Korea had suffered from sanctions after its first nuclear test in 2006."
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That sounded like a lot, so I did a Google, and...
Q. How much money is there in the world?
A. "To make this question answerable in a finite amount of time, let's simplify things and ask, "How much money is there in actual United States dollars?" Since the statistics for the U.S. are easy to come by, we can examine this question in a couple of different ways.
The first way to look at it might be, "How much cash is there in U.S. currency?" If you took all the bills and coins floating around today and added them all up, how much money would you have? All of that hard and easily liquidated currency is known as the M0 money supply. This includes the bills and coins in people's pockets and mattresses, the money on hand in bank vaults and all of the deposits those banks have at reserve banks [source: Hamilton]. According to the Federal Reserve, there was $908.6 billion in the M0 supply stream as of July 2009 [source: Federal Reserve]. That sounds like an incredible amount, but think about it this way: According to the CIA, there were 307,212,123 Americans alive that month [source: CIA]. If you took all the cash and divided it up equally, each person should have about $3,000 in cash on them (or stuffed under the mattress). Obviously, there's some money missing, but there's an easy explanation for that: The Federal Reserve says that at any given time, between one-half and two-thirds of the M0 money stock of U.S. dollars is held overseas [source: Federal Reserve].
The rest of the money is held in bank accounts of various types, and the Federal Reserve tracks these funds in three different values known as the M1, M2 and M3 money supplies:
M1 represents all of the currency in the M0 money supply, plus all of the money held in checking accounts and other checkable accounts, as well as all of the money in travelers' checks. In July 2009, the M1 money supply for U.S. dollars equaled about $1,655.6 billion [source: Federal Reserve].
M2 is the M1 supply, plus all of the money held in money market funds, savings accounts and small CDs. In July 2009, the M2 money supply was about $8,326.8 billion [source: Federal Reserve].
M3 is M2 plus all of the large CDs. As of March 2006, the Fed no longer tracks the M3 money stock as an economic indicator. That month, M3 totaled around $10.3 trillion [source: St. Louis Fed].
All told, anyone looking for all of the U.S. dollars in the world in July 2009 could expect to find around $8.3 trillion in existence.
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Conclusion: Korean balls are huge and pendulous.