MONEY TRADERS
The son did not understand that the money trader had subjugated the farms to finance, of food to money.
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The old man and woman didn’t understand the implications of entrusting their farms’ money business to a money trader. They were in over their heads, so to speak. What they knew of money they learned from trading their fruits and meats into the era when coins took the place of other goods. Like all other growers and makers of goods, their impression was that money was a good. It made trade easier and more varied. It extended trade beyond the range of nearby ports.
The money trader, for his part, was familiar with different kinds of money and how they worked together. At first, his work for the farms was straightforward; he kept track of the income from fruits and meats and of expenses for goods the farms needed. The work was simply bookkeeping flows of goods and their equivalents in money.
The money trader was from an island down the coast. His parents had no farm, but he grew up working on other people’s farms. His father abandoned his mother shortly after his birth and she died when he was a teenager, having supported him meanwhile as a small shopkeeper. Undaunted, or perhaps inspired by these circumstances, he determined to leave the island and seek a life on the mainland.
He found seasonal work on farms along the coast, learning from each farmer what it means to have a farm. He understood quickly the similar concerns arising from different kinds of farming. Along the way, he also worked for artisans — tool makers, cobblers, cartwrights and carters. He learned what it means to have a business, to make or grow or do things and trade things. By the time the old man and woman asked him to handle the farm monies, the money trader had gained wide expertise in trade and money.
The old man and woman were not the first to recognize his talent; but they were the first to give him wide latitude in his work. Other employers relied on him for keeping books; the old man and woman asked him to oversee the whole operations of the farms because their children were not experienced enough to take on the overall handling of the prodigious bounty of fruits and meats.
At first almost imperceptibly and then quite rapidly, two things happened. Two things that are one thing: loss of community. On one hand, as the old man and woman relaxed from overseeing everything, they became less present among the coastal communities that constituted the realm of their leadership, where they were an organic sort of king and queen, elevated by respect among the peoples. No others with the necessary mix of practical skills and deep integrity emerged to replace them. So, the first consequence of hiring the money trader was a weakening of the overall sense of community along the coast.
The weakening of an overall sense of community sharpened differences among the coastal communities. Farmers and makers fell back on differences among themselves and between themselves. Seemingly random conflicts became entrenched differences. The overall community that was a realm of communities came apart. Differences took hold within communities, some more rapidly than others. All this happened during the course of a few years.
Meanwhile, the second thing was that the money trader, now solely in charge of the farms, was also the only linkage among the communities, serving as money manager for all the competing farmers and makers. He was not a king in the old sense: arising from among the people, sharing their lives, recognized for group leadership. The money trader was an overlord: rising above the people, privy to their secrets, recognized for his skill to maximize individual wealth and minimize obligations.
By the time the son of the old man and woman inherited the farms, the transition from realm to feuding communities and individuals was complete.
The son of the old man and woman lived well, sustained by cash flow and little work. The money trader oversaw everything. The son had no need to work in the orchards and pastures, no need to understand fruits and meats. He had no knowledge or interest in money trading either. He did not comprehend the money trader’s interest in interest. Nor did he see how the money trader’s interest in interest extended into banking, loans, mortgages, derivatives of the farms’ income and obligations. The son did not understand that the money trader had subjugated the farms to finance, of food to money.
A generation passed and the grandson of the old man and woman inherited the farms, which were by now completely severed from a farm family. The farms depended, as always, on weather and transportation and networks of exchange from and to the farms. But the balance of forces and activities that make up the human side of things were now only nominally a family. The money trader managed logistics and shaped strategy for growing, harvesting, shipping. Fruits and meats were no longer simply fruits and meats; they were products in a system of production overseen through bookkeeping. Fruits and meats were ephemeral objects represented by numbers in the money trader’s increasingly complex financial empire.
With nothing to do but consume, the old man and woman’s grandson focused on wine; not grapes and their processing that the money trader had introduced to the farms, but on the wine itself. The grandson was often drunk, even when he met with the money trader to sign papers for whatever deals were being made. Wine in one hand, a pen in the other, he signed whatever was put in front of him. He did not know that one paper pledged the entire estate — the farms and all their associated operations as collateral for a bank loan in a city on the other side of the country to finance a machine factory. By this pen stroke, repeated by dozens of other employers of the money manager, assets of all sorts were converted into debt obligations. What the money manager had taken over as a realm of bounty was now deeply in debt.
In the span of two generations, everything the money manager had learned from trade, currency, and credit by handling real transactions afforded him a position of wealth and power through which, by managing logistics and shaping strategy, he brought his clients into large commercial networks tied to industrial production, displacing agriculture and artisans alike. In the process, the money manager had become a personage in politics, buoyed by his wealth and connections. He became part of government.
The rest of the story is short, but not sweet: The machine factory failed, the loans came due, and the banks seized the collateral. The collateral was not sufficient to pay the loans. The money manager was now in government and cared little for the farms and workshops themselves, nor even for the failed factory. The money manager cared about the commercial network in and through which he had become wealthy by manipulating others assets. The money manager was recognized in government as a financier. Government was in need of finance. Government followed the money manager’s advice just as the farmers and artisans had done. But government was in a position to erase debt in ways farmers and artisans cannot: Government can print money.
Government, under the watchful guidance of the money manager, bailed out the banks that had made the factory loans. The bankers were happy. The factory itself was left in collapse. The farmers and artisans were at the back of the line. But they played an indispensable role: they paid taxes to the government so it could print money for the banks.
The grandson of the old man and woman passed away shortly after being evicted by the farms’ new owners, the farms having been seized and sold to investors far away. The story of fruits and meats and community of growers and makers seems to be at an end.
But there was a lineage. The old woman had a sister. The sister had children and her children had children. The sister’s many-times great grandson, the many-times great-grand nephew of the old man and woman, carries his own story, built from life as a descendant of a true king and queen.
