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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

I'm Tim Halford.

Today we bring you the second instalment of un-numbers of the year programme.

When our guests tell us their most memorable number from 2014,

and our first number is certainly the biggest.

It's brought to you by a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

Her name is Pippa Malmgren.

My number is a quadrillion.

That's a big number.

A quadrillion is, if I remember, a thousand times a trillion.

So why should we be talking about quadrillion?

Well, I think this number is going to come up a lot more often.

It's come up in the last year because the Japanese debt now exceeds one quadrillion.

So in economics, we have a practical example of this matter.

In the financial markets, we talk about regulating the financial markets

and you ask, well, how big are they?

...