$900-Trillion Suit: How Much Money Is That?

A woman in New York has sued the city for an astounding $900- trillion for placing her two children in a foster home three years ago.

Fausat Ogunbayo, 46, of Staten Island, accused the city and its Administration for Children’s Services for causing her, among other things, economic hardship, substantial economic injuries and for violating her civil rights.

It’s unclear how she arrived at that exalted figure of $900-trillion, but I wondered how much money that is.

This is what I came up with:

*If you handed out all that cash to everyone on the planet equally, each man, woman and child would receive about $128,571 (excluding taxes, of course).

*The figure is almost 62 times the size of the United States’ annual gross domestic product (the largest economy in the world).

*The highest paid player in the NBA, Kobe Bryant (who makes $25.2-million per year) would have to work about 36-million years to earn that amount.

*If you took the combined wealth of the ten richest Americans, it wouldn’t even amount to $1-trillion, or less than one-tenth of one percent of what Ogunbayo is seeking.

*The total market cap of all companies in the S&P 500 ($9.8 trillion as of June 30), would be a little more than 1 percent of $900-trillion.