ELI5: If someone found a magic lamp and wished for $10 trillion, what would ACTUALLY happen?

I don't know what the mechanics of magic lamp currency delivery are.

$10 trillion is a wildly unwieldy amount of cash. You'd need a fair-sized high school gymnasium stacked to the rafters with $100 bills just to store it. So while I assume this is possible, it can't be the easiest way to manage it. You'd also have to account for how you came into possession of so much cash, and it's too much to launder, so count on having to list it as income to the IRS and answer A LOT of questions that you won't have a plausible answer to.

So let's assume your checking account balance just went up $10 trillion. You'd have the same problem with taxes. You'd also have increased the balance sheet for that bank by AT LEAST a factor of 10 (JP Morgan and BoA have ~$1 trillion in deposits each last I saw). So that bank would immediately be able to loan out a ton more money. You might singlehandedly affect the credit markets due to this massive influx of cash that your bank can now loan out. Obviously there would also be massive implications for their share price.

You'd probably be in some danger. Kidnapping would be an issue, but you could likely hire your own militia that would make this much more difficult. The bigger annoyance will be the societal pressure to fix things. You could fund Meals on Wheels for the next 10,000 years for example. Expect to be vilified, no matter how much you donate to help out. I doubt it would be as fun as you think.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread