The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.

If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.

A million dollars' worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb).

One million dollars' worth of once-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.

TIP is the acronym for "To Insure Promptness."

The term "Blue Chip" comes from the colour of the poker chip with the highest value, blue.

Nessie, the Loch Ness monster is protected by the 1912 Protection of Animals Acts of Scotland. With good reason - Nessie is worth $40 million annually to Scottish tourism.

Of the more than $50 billion worth of diet products sold every year, almost $20 billion are spent on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.

Annual global spending on education is $80 billion.

US and European expenditure on pet food is $17 billion per year.

The global expenditure on healthcare and nutrition is $13 billion.

Money notes are not made from paper, it is made mostly from a special blend of cotton and linen.

In 1932, when a shortage of cash occurred in Tenino, Washington, USA, notes were made out of wood for a brief period. The wood notes came in $1, $5 and $10 values.

The world's largest coins, in size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska around 1850. They were about a metre (3 ft) long, half-a-metre (about 2 ft) wide, weighed 40 kg (90 lb), and were worth $2,500.

The first credit card was issued by American Express in 1951.

About 30% of consumers use their credit card as their main means of buying Christmas goodies, 70% do not save to buy Christmas gifts and 86% of consumers do their Christmas shopping during December.

Excessive use of credit is cited as a major cause of non-business bankruptcy, second only to unemployment.

Statistics show that people with high, medium and low income groups spend about the same amount on Christmas gifts.

In the 1400s, global income rose only 0,1% per year; today it often tops 5%.

The average age of Forbes's 400 wealthiest individuals is 63.

In 1955 the richest woman in the world was Mrs Hetty Green Wilks, who left an estate of $95 million in a will that was found in a tin box with four pieces of soap.

In 2001 the richest woman was Liliane Bettencourt, the daughter of L'Oreal's founder. She has a net worth of $14 billion (depending on how the stock market did today).

In 2000, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is the second wealthiest woman, with $5,2 billion.

Queen Elizabeth II is one of the 10th wealthiest women in the world.

The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock.

The term "smart money" refers to gamblers who have inside information or have arranged a fix, the gambling term for insuring the outcome of an event by illegal methods.

Small-time gamblers who place small bet in order to prolong the excitement of a game are called "dead fish" by game operators because the longer the playing time, the greater the chances of losing.

In gambling language, for a gambling house a "sure-thing" is a wager that a player has little chance of winning; "easy money" is their profit from an inexperienced bettor, an unlucky player is called a "stiff."

Australians are the heaviest gamblers in the world; an estimated 82% of Australians bet. That is twice as much per capita as Europeans or Americans. Yet, Australia, with less than 1% of the world population, has 20% of the world's poker machines.

There are more than 7 million millionaires in the world.

80% of millionaires drive second-hand cars.

In 1900, the price of gold was less than $40 per ounce. It reached $600 in 1930, now struggling to reach $400 per ounce.

If Los Angeles County was a country, it would be the 19th largest economy in the world.

If California was a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world.

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year - about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth.

In 1965, CEOs earned on average 44 times more than factory workers. In 1998, CEOs earned on average 326 times more than factory workers and in 1999, they earned 419 times more than factory workers.

The income gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest measured by average national income per head increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1998.

A third of the world's people live on less than $2 a day, with 1,2 billion people living on less than $1 a day.

In the 17th century, wool fabrics accounted for about two-thirds of England's foreign trade. Today, the leading wool producers are Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and China.

The NASDAQ stock exchange was totally disabled in on day in December 1987 when a squirrel burrowed through a telephone line.

In 1990, the word "recession" appeared in 1,583 articles in The Wall Street Journal.

Global sales of pre-recorded music total more than $40 billion.

Tourism is the world's biggest industry, affecting 240 million jobs.

In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.