One Thousand Million ≠ One Billion

[irishmaestro]

America and American usage is a bundle of stupidities, to paraphrase Anne Frank. Like the number '1,000,000,000', for example. In the early twentieth century, every country but America considered that number to be either 'a thousand million' or the then slightly archaic 'a milliard'. The idea was that a billion was a million squared, a trillion

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Oh yeah, from a Fidel Castro rant in 1999:But is the balloon that continues inflating the only threat and the only speculative gamble? Another phenomenon that is reaching ever more fabulous and uncontrollable proportions is that of speculative operations involving currencies. These operations now represent a minimum of a trillion dollars a day. Some claim it to be 1.5 trillion. Scarcely 14 years ago, this figure was only 150 billion dollars a year. There could be confusion regarding the figures. It is difficult to express them, and even more so to translate them from English to Spanish. What we call a billion in Spanish, that is, a million million, is a trillion in North American English. On the other hand, a billion in North American English is a thousand million in Spanish. Now they have come up with the milliard, which means a thousand million in both Spanish and English. These language difficulties demonstrate how difficult it is to follow and comprehend the fabulous figures that reflect the degree of speculation in the current world economic order. The immense majority of the world's nations pay for it with the perennial risk of ruin. The slightest carelessness can lead the speculators to attack, devaluating the currency in any one of these nations, and liquidating their hard currency reserves, built up over decades perhaps, in a matter of days. The world order has created the conditions for this. Absolutely no one is or can be safe. The wolves, grouped in packs and aided by computer programs, know where to attack, when to attack and why to attack.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/130.html