howies®

The naughty banks have been in the press a lot lately, but do you know how they came to be in the first place?

Once upon a time, well, in the in the middle ages to be exact, Venetian merchants relied on gold as a standard value to prevent the limitations of  barter (I imagine carrying a lot of chickens around with you to exchange for bread and honey would have been quite annoying!)

At sea their stores of gold would be vulnerable to pirates, so some ingenious people set up strong vaults and offered to look after the merchant’s gold for them while they were at sea. So that no gold had to be moved by the merchants, they gave out ‘promissory notes’ in exchange for goods, essentially promising that the vendor could collect the merchant’s gold from the vault. The notes soon took on the same value as the gold as vendors just passed them between one another.

The newly established ‘bankers’ then realised that the gold wasn’t leaving thevaults so they would sneakily lend it out to other people and charge them interest, thereby starting the now familiar magic trick of creating money out of nothing by lending money that wasn’t even theirs.

This system was regularised by the Banking Acts in the early nineteenth century and has been accepted ever since. The End ……

Or, can we go back to the good ole fashioned barter system? A customer the other day did offer the jacket off  his own back in exchange for the Cuddy shrit that Will was wearing…it turns out the jacket wasn’t entirely his as he still owed his friend a shirt in exchange! Maybe this customer was a banker?!