Isn't floating point specifically for dealing with large orders of magnitude ? (Economics of floating vs fixed point chips might distort things though ?) Also

Isn't floating point specifically for dealing with large orders of magnitude ? (Economics of floating vs fixed point chips might distort things though ?) Also, in the case that you meant this : you might need fractions of even base units for internal calculations : IIRC banking, which doesn't accept any level of uncertainty, and so uses exclusively fixed precision, uses tens of cents rather than cents as a base unit ?