It's been widely reported that JPMorgan Chase (JPM 0.49%) will pay $13 billion to settle with regulators to end a host of investigations surrounding its mortgage unit from before the financial crisis. To put that amount in perspective, let's consider 13 things that are surprisingly smaller than 13 billion.
1. $11,018,023,538
JPMorgan's settlement would make it the 121st largest country by GDP last year, eclipsing Chad, which had a GDP of just north of $11 billion.
Source: Google.
2. $8,510,000,000
According to Forbes, that's the combined value of the eight major professional sports teams in New York -- the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, and Islanders. And it's still about $4.5 billion short of what Jamie Dimon and team may pay out.
Source: Shawn Collins.
3. 7,119,193,190
At the time of writing, that's how many people there are in the world.
Source: James Cridland.
4. 5,134,000,000
In 2012, Google averaged a little over 5 billion searches per day, so it would take two and a half days of having people search on their browsers to hit 13 billion.
Source: Google.
5. 2,800,000,000
The BP Deepwater Horizon is estimated to have spilled about 4.9 million barrels of oil. That means you could have collected 2.8 billion pint glasses' worth of oil during the cleanup effort.
Source: Green Fire Productions.
6. 1,800,000,000
There are about 57 billion servings of beverages in the world each day -- and Coca-Cola accounts for 1.8 billion of them. Thirteen billion is roughly one week's worth of Coca-Cola beverage servings.
7. 989,061,000
As of the most recent annual report, Wal-Mart has a little more than 989 million square feet of stores around the world. That means Wal-Mart would have to grow 13 times larger before it hit 13 billion square feet.
8. 155,887,142
That's the number of inches of Interstate 10 -- which stretches from Jacksonville, Fla., to Santa Monica, Calif.
Source: Google.
9. 89,300,000
As of Jan. 1 of this year, there were 89.3 million cows in the United States.
Source: Emmett Tullos.
10. 69,000,000
McDonald's serves around 69 million customers per day -- which means it would take six months before McDonald's sold to 13 billion customers.
11. 402,576
Michael Jordan scored 32,292 points in his NBA career. We would need to see a little over 400,000 more careers from Michael Jordan for him to hit 13 billion points.
Source: Esparta Palma.
12. 27,208
That's the number times you could go to the moon and back before you reached 13 billion miles on your spaceship.
Source: Jason Bache.
13. 3
As in three days. According to the World Bank, 2.4 billion people lived on less than $2 a day in 2010. That means that JPMorgan could sustain a little more than a third of the world's population for three days with the amount of its settlement.
Source: Michael Bentley.
While many people may bemoan the $13 billion charge, keep all these figures in mind, because it's easy for all of us to lose our sense of perspective when numbers get this big.
