Earlier quoted context omitted.
hehe I would invest it. I would buy most of wall street and wait for it to bounce back. Turn that 700b to 10 trillion.
And then what?
A person can do a lot for the world with 10 trillion.
Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
141–150 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#142Try and fix poverty, hunger, clean drinking water in a sustainable way.
A few years ago I attended a talk by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University who was commissioned by the UN to develop a program to end worldwide poverty with sustainable, long-term initiatives -- Note this is not the standard aid, but stuff like microcredit and micro-entrepreneurship. He traveled the world and came back with the price tag: $1 trillion. That is not to relief, but to END poverty worldwid…
What kind of guarantee did that have?
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#143Cure cancer Cure HIV Eliminate hunger Eliminate thirst Take over Equatorial Guinea
The only one of these you could afford for $700b is Equatorial Guinea... :P
1B is enough to take over Equatorial Guinea... the failed 2004 coup attempt was financed with a pathetic 20M. This says that the military budget of EG is 150M/year (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm) and I suspect that is a very high estimate.
It would be easy to invest in modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in African nations with generous IP laws and then start making modern HIV medications available for practically nothing.
Curing cancer is more of a crapshoot, but throwing several hundred billion at the problem would be a good start, if nothing else.
Proper distribution of the money remaining could go a long way towards eliminating extreme poverty.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#144Try and fix poverty, hunger, clean drinking water in a sustainable way.
A few years ago I attended a talk by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University who was commissioned by the UN to develop a program to end worldwide poverty with sustainable, long-term initiatives -- Note this is not the standard aid, but stuff like microcredit and micro-entrepreneurship. He traveled the world and came back with the price tag: $1 trillion. That is not to relief, but to END poverty worldwid…
Sounds about right. This is something worth adding a trillion to the US Debt for.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I attended a talk by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University who was commissioned by the UN to develop a program to end worldwide poverty with sustainable, long-term initiatives -- Note this is not the standard aid, but stuff like microcredit and micro-entrepreneurship. He traveled the world and came back with the price tag: $1 trillion. That is not to relief, but to END poverty worldwid…
What kind of guarantee did that have?
Probably a better one than anything that Paulson is giving!
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
$50K is a lot of money! Can any household still be considered poor with $49K a year?
Not that much. $50K after tax is what, $40K? Just a tad over? Rent? Food? That's all assuming you're young and single. Have kids? Good friggin' luck. You can't even afford a mortgage on $50K a year. I've got a $100K job offer pending my graduation, and even with that I still have to be aware of my budget to even save something.
I think that depends on where you live...
Remember - most of america is not SF!!!
Get a mortgage on something like this: http://www.househunterbob.com/Listing/ViewListingDetails.asp... and for $50K per year - you can buy 500 houses!
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#147Remember, 700B pays for around 400 space shuttles. Just to give a sense of scale.
Or, for other means of comparison, $700b is about:
87 next generation aircraft carriers (or about 155 current-generation aircraft carriers)
500 stealth bombers (or 5000 stealth fighters)
10 years of federal education spending in the US
1.1% of the worldwide annual GDP
2/5 of the combined net worth of the 100 wealthiest people (or, if you prefer, 12 times the net worth of Bill Gates, or about 1/6 of the combined net worth of the 1000 wealthiest people)
23 times the total annual income tax collected from the lower 50% of filers with positive adjusted gross income in 2006 (see http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html)
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#148I would buy massive amounts of gold and start a anonymous, secure digital currency backed by gold :)
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#149Since it seems like defaulting mortgages are the cause of the situation, why not use the money to pay off those mortgages?. If it took $50,000 on average to save an individual mortgage, then you could rescue 14 million mortgages. Some would say that presents a moral hazard, but it seems like that cat is way out of the bag already.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?
#150Replace the US auto fleet with Better Place cars http://www.betterplace.com/ .