West's leaders, bamboozling us in billions -will soon be tinkering in trillions!

As an oilman I began to understand the import of big numbers at a fairly young age. In the early days of the North Sea discoveries, a giant oilfield, of which there were few, need contain over one billion barrels (each of 42 US gallons) of recoverable reserves in order to be so descibed. Such was, however, only a US billion, one thousand million rather than the British designation of a billion then being a million, million, which today we describe as a trillion.

Trillions were still at that time pretty hard to get the mind around, and only those in the natural gas end of the business seemed happy to rattle off production rates in the billions per day and eventual recoverable reserves measured in trillions.

What a contrast with today's world, where every new and/or glamorous media graduate (being female appears a similar prerequisite) can happily prattle of billions of pounds and dollars here and hundreds of millions there without ever blinking a heavily masacred eyelid. Yet, I reckon, it is only in the last ten to fifteen years or so that this became necessary.

Yesterday as Mervyn King announced more money printing for the UK, and the West's financial head tricksters met in Berlin, read here, it appeared to me sensible that I had better start pondering how many billion cubic feet of gas a field must produce, and for how long, to be considered a giant as measured in trillions of cubic feet of reserves - maybe then, in only a very few years time, I'll be better positioned to understand my groceries bill!

Or will the capital controls mentioned in the above link, also allow currencies to be reduced in value to a hundreth, or even a thousandth of their previous worth, as befits banana republics led by self-serving incompetents, and such research become redundant.