What is a Billion?

Reading an English newspaper on Monday I think, I usually go directly to the comments sometimes I find real good ones, you know the love/hate Brexit ones. Well this one was about trade with India and the guy commenting, whom I suppose is a Brexiteer, said that given the deficit with the EU was about 50 billion pounds that meant that represented a per capita deficit of 70 million pounds approximately, while with India it was so much lower.

Now that really got me thinking, it just could not be, but then I saw what was happening. This guy was thinking 1 billion is 1,000,000X1,000,000 when in reality in the financial world 1 billion is 1,000,000X1,000, better said the deficit per capita is about 70,000 pounds, nothing to laugh at but I guess the UK makes it up with exports to other parts of the world.

But now the question is, what is correct? 1 million X 1 million or 1 million X 1 thousand? Well it seems quite a while back it was standardized that 1 billion is 1 thousand millions, 1 trillion is 1 thousand billions etc.

Just think about it, if it was 1 million X 1 million we would have no billionaires and in fact very few economies in the world would even have a GDP of 1 billion, here in America it would only be the USA, Canada, Brazil and Mexico. While with the current definition even my country Honduras gets to produce multiple billions every year.