UK is worth 211 Bill Gates

It’s an interesting comparision, that the Guardian makes today:

After putting a price tag on all our buildings, equipment and other assets, the Office for National Statistics said the country was worth £5.3 trillion at the end of 2003. Or to be more precise: £5,344bn or £5,344,000m. Of course the mind boggles. For that sort of money we could build 534 Crossrail projects or run the expanded NHS for more than half a century. In still starker terms, £5.3 trillion would also be enough for 16 US invasions of Iraq (including reconstruction).

Or, as they point out, this is equivalent to 211 times the wealth of Bill Gates. Which is a pretty effective way of showing just how rich he is, when you realise that the UK population is 59,2 million. Some 57% of the UK’s wealth is represented by the value of the country’s homes.

On a completely different note, I could never remember when to put an apostrophe in the first word of this posting, until I found this tip in dictionary.com.