[rsj_hn]

Yes, but those nominal amounts are just paper. They are a mechanism to marshall labor, nothing more. They don't correspond to real resources. This is an interesting fallacy -- I remember playing Freeciv, and you would get 1000 coins in the bank, and if you wanted to speed up building of some monument, you just spend the coins and poof, all these things get built, even if you don't have the labor or real resources to do it. The world doesn't work like that. In the real world, if you try to cash out your stock and sell it to build something without the real resources to do it, all that happens is inflation goes up. But a country really only has the labor and land and domestic equipment that it has, and it needs to use that to build all the dams. You can create paper claims valued at hundreds of trillions of dollars if you want, but it doesn't add a single hour of manpower to the country.