LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
WHAT'S IN A TRILLION:
A look at the number in Bush's $3 trillion budget
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
1 million a year to spend would need three million years to blow $3 trillion. The United States, a government of sizable financial appetite, can do it in one.
Three trillion dollars is about what the U.S. federal government will spend this year for domestic and defence programs and benefit entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, according to President George W. Bush's latest federal budget proposal Monday.
A trillion is a figure more commonly used when talking about outer space. A light year, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a year, is about 9.6 trillion kilometres.
Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That's a million times one million, or a thousand times one billion.
There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if the U.S. government's budget was divided up. If the money was split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.
Counting to three trillion at a rate of one number a second would take almost 95,000 years.
Looking at it another way, one would have to circumnavigate the globe 120 million times to travel three trillion miles - or 4.8 trillion kilometres. Similarly, that would be some 17,000 round trips to the sun. The universe, 15 billion years old at the outside, would need another 200 such lifetimes to reach three trillion years.
Neighbors sue lender over house left vacant
The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (KRT) via NewsEdge Corporation
Jan. 24--A north Minneapolis neighborhood is taking on mortgage giant CitiMortgage in a test case attempting to make careless lending an act for which lenders can be held liable in Minnesota.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday for the Hawthorne neighborhood reflects a growing national effort to hold lenders legally responsible for the damage caused by shaky loans that go to foreclosure.
Some cities have taken on lenders. Baltimore this month asked a federal court to order Wells Fargo Bank to reimburse it for lost taxes and other costs from foreclosures. It alleged predatory lending that targeted black home buyers.
The Hawthorne case has the potential to set a national precedent, according to Prentiss Cox, a University of Minnesota law professor. Cleveland State University credit market specialist Kathleen Engel reports a flurry of recent calls from cities and states considering lawsuits but added, "It's by no means a slam-dunk.
"In Hawthorne, the lawsuit alleges that CitiMortgage used "negligent and improvident lending practices" to finance the purchase last March of a two-story white frame house on 31st Avenue. N. The neighborhood wants to buy the house from CitiMortgage for a redevelopment project but said it can't get a response.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit alleges, the property has become a neighborhood eyesore that has attracted housing tags and 911 calls. It is seeking damages, a monitored alarm system and compliance with the city housing code.'An aggressive legal theory'
According to lawyer Mark Ireland of the nonprofit Foreclosure Law Relief Project, who researched and filed the lawsuit, courts nationally have established the tort, or injury, of improvident lending in cases involving credit cards or lending to someone who is mentally incompetent. The Hawthorne lawsuit attempts to extend that to mortgage lending and foreclosures.
"This is an aggressive legal theory," Cox said. But he added that courts evolve with the larger society.
"The thinking about mortgage lending has changed radically in the last year as the consequences of the industry's lack of care have become obvious to everybody," Cox said. Those include owners losing homes, blighted neighborhoods, tightened credit markets and Wall Street losses, he said.
"This industry acted in a rogue manner increasingly over the last 10 years, until last year, and the consequences of that have become obvious. I think that changes people's thinking about the legal consequences.
"The Hawthorne neighborhood is in the epicenter of the Twin Cities foreclosure crisis. Citywide, foreclosures have tripled from 865 in 2005 to at least 2,500 last year.
The neighborhood complained by letter to CitiMortgage twice last fall that the property was a nuisance. It asked CitiMortgage to use a lender's option to shorten to five weeks the period in which a boarded and foreclosed property can be redeemed by the borrower. But it said it got little substantive response.
The lawsuit alleges, citing studies elsewhere, that the property has diminished property values for neighbors.
It claims that CitMortgage either knew the mortgage couldn't be repaid or would have known it if it had exercised due care before making the loan.
