A yard is investment banking slang for a billion. A yard may refer to a volume or to a value of 1,000,000,000.
Its original advantage over the word "billion" is that it is unambiguous (although as the use of billion to mean a million million is becoming rare, this is becoming less important. It probably originated in currency trading where many conversations take place in international contexts.
It also cannot be misheard as a million or trillion.
Currency traders also tend to use concise wording anyway: when trading mere millions the million is usually dropped: so a currency traders saying one dollar means a million dollars.