Can you grasp a trillion $$?

NEW YORK - The thicket of figures hurled at us since Wall Street began to melt down last month boggles the mind.

Bailout of the U.S. financial system: $700 billion. Sweeteners to get the bill through Congress: $140 billion. Federal loan to insurer AIG: $85 billion. John McCain government mortgage buyback proposal: $300 billion.

The Fed announced Wednesday it would lend AIG an additional $37.5 billion, and we hardly flinched.

The numbers we are asked to comprehend are so massive that it takes something even larger to get our attention.

Here's something: Between the stock market peak of Oct. 9, 2007, and exactly one year later - which is to say, encompassing the Wall Street free fall - $8.3 trillion was vaporized.

And that's still less than the national debt: $10,200,700,000,000 and growing.

A suggestion comes from John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and author of "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper." He suggests thinking of the gobsmacking numbers in terms of time: 1 million seconds is about 11 1/2 days, 1 billion seconds 32 years, 1 trillion seconds 32,000 years.

Almost long enough for your 401(k) to recover. *