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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

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Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#241

Post by lxgr »

necovek wrote: post #236
a2800276 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, people who work at the Fed just print their salary at the end of the month.

That'd be fun, but I am pretty sure they get it electronically into their bank account — as in, no money is ever made for their salaries, just like most white collar workers.

Demand deposits in bank accounts are also money.

As a side note: In some countries, central bank employees are the only individuals that can actually hold non-paper M0 (or MB?) money, since they get paid their salaries into a central bank account, which are otherwise only available to commercial banks. This used to be the case in Germany and Austria, but has been phased out at some point, as far as I remember.

But even if Fed employees just get paid in regular old M1 demand deposits, that's money nonetheless.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#242

Post by meta_ai_x »

lxgr wrote: post #239
ggreer wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that they measured a stack of bills sitting on a table, then did the math to make a metal frame to contain $1,000,000. But they didn't account for stacks compressing under the weight of higher stacks, and it wouldn't look as nice if the top part of the cube was empty. Still, it does seem like it would be cheaper to rebuild the case than to add $500k to it. Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash…

> Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent. The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.

No. We have a double accounting system. For every $1 it creates, it has to create an equivalent liability.

And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#244

Post by moralestapia »

Hey, this is great.

>It’s stupidly simple: upload an image, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you’ve placed. That’s it. But somehow, nothing like it existed.

A small related story.

I once was an intern on a bioscience laboratory that was working with maize. My very intern-y job was to count the number of white spots on the leaves of like ... thousands of plants.

Improvement # 1 (not by me but a colleage), we scanned the plants, on a regular flatbed scanner, they were small enough to fit in.

Improvement # 2 (this one was me), the plan was to automatically count all the spots with CV but it wasn't really working that well; it was back in 2012 and the algos were not that good, they still missed some and we needed to be as accurate as possible. I ended up doing a web app very similar to the one in the article, you just loaded an image and start tagging stuff and at the end it gave you a count for each type of spot you tagged ...

... then we spent weeks scanning and tagging plants full-time :'(.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#245

Post by lxgr »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #242
lxgr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent. The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.

No. We have a double accounting system. For every $1 it creates, it has to create an equivalent liability. And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less

Not sure when exactly the Fed accounts for USD printed – i.e. only once distributed to somebody else, or as soon as they're printed and still owned by the Fed – but even in the latter case, asset and liability work out to exactly zero.

So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#246

Post by pavon »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #7

There are additional stacks hidden by the aluminum framing. Everything is flush against the glass so there are a few more inches on each face not counted in the 102 figure.

I'm guessing that is an illusion due to refraction through thick (plexi)glass.

Otherwise, if the bills really are where they appear, then there would have to be some partial (cut) bills along the edges for everything to line up properly.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#247

Post by jacksnipe »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #242
lxgr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent. The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.

No. We have a double accounting system. For every $1 it creates, it has to create an equivalent liability. And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less

I mean, that's a very corporate accounting way of looking at it. But countries are not corporations, or even banks, and the abstraction is so leaky it's pretty much never worth using.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#248

Post by moralestapia »

mrandish wrote: post #91

> For all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old newspaper. I think this is the answer. I suspect the exhibit designers had a cool idea for a display, did a rough estimate of the area needed and then commissioned the exhibit builders to make the big metal-framed cube. Either they made an error in their calculation or the innate variability in the size of stacks of used bills threw it off. It's also possi…

Museum: "Don't worry, no one will notice".

Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#250

Post by doubled112 »

necovek wrote: post #236
a2800276 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, people who work at the Fed just print their salary at the end of the month.

That'd be fun, but I am pretty sure they get it electronically into their bank account — as in, no money is ever made for their salaries, just like most white collar workers.

While not money, and probably not even real, those numbers in a DB still keep my kids fed. Tasty tasty DB numbers.
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