How much does $crooge have in his money bin?

[John M Baker]

	I know that Don Rosa has expressed his distaste for attempts to 
answer this question, but I can't resist a few observations.
	1.  Unca Carl repeatedly told us, to the penny, the exact amount, 
sometimes expressed as the amount in the money bin and sometimes as the 
total fortune.  These totals have the following in common:  They are 
never the same in two different stories.  They always use made-up numbers 
("nine multicaplujillion," etc.), presumably because real numbers don't 
go high enough.  And the amount always ends, "and sixteen cents."
	2.  Scrooge frequently worries, with some apparent justification 
(e.g., "The Pixilated Parrot"), that without the money in his money bin 
he will be only a poor old man.  Yet it is also clear that he has vast 
holdings elsewhere; remember the contest with Flintheart Glomgold, where 
their holdings are actually liquidated.  Presumably the answer is that he 
has vast requirements for current cash and cannot continue operations 
without the resources of his money bin.
	(This brings up a related question:  Why doesn't Scrooge just put 
his money in banks and receive a return on his investment?  Although the 
emotional meaning of the money to him should not be discounted, it also 
cannot be the whole story.  One answer is that the money has a tangible 
value as an investment, because of the scarcity of the coins and bills on 
the collectors' market; banks would not give him credit above the face 
value, and extensive sales to collectors would depress the market.  
Second, bank deposits are insured only to the first $100,000, and Scrooge 
is undoubtedly concerned about safety.)
	3.  Attempts to calculate the fortune based upon the volume of 
the money bin are doomed to failure, for two reasons.  First, we don't 
even know what the volume is, since "three cubic acres" is not a standard 
measure of volume.  Should we assume that each cubic acre is a cube just 
over 208 feet per side?  Or should we assume that the money bin covers 
three acres, to a depth of about 100 feet?  The bin certainly looks 
closer to three than six acres?
	A more fundamental problem is the inability to assign any value 
to a given volume.  Scrooge probably couldn't do it himself:  Should he 
use the value at which his coins and bills would sell if slowly released 
to collectors, or should he use the depressed prices that would prevail 
if collectors knew his rare coins and bills were being liquidated?  Note 
also that the volume has stayed under the 100-foot marker, though we know 
he has added to the money bin during that time.  Probably he is upgrading 
the collection, using up less valuable coins and bills of lower 
denomination and recent vintage while retaining the collectors' items and 
adding high-denomination bills.
	4.  Having said all that, remember that there was one story in 
which the fortune was converted to $1,000,000 bills and stored in a 
30-foot sphere.  If we assume the inner diameter to be 28 feet, the 
question becomes how many $1,000,000 bills would fit in a sphere of that 
size.  A bill is 6 3/16" x 2 5/8".  Assume that they are stacked 150 to 
the inch (new bills stack more than that to the inch, but these probably 
were not new and certainly were not packed with 100% efficiency).  Then 
there are 15,960 (rounding slightly) to the cubic foot.  Since the volume 
of a cube equals 4/3 times pi times the cube of the  radius, there are 
11,494 cubic feet to the sphere.  That works out to a fortune of 
$183,444,240,000,000 - at one time in the past, and without taking 
account of the holdings elsewhere.

				JMB