He often went to buy tools with which to repair the ranch house, but he also passed the timeof day chatting with the gardener, or with the keepersof the general store and the hardware store, whose livelihoods he diminished day by day, as he lengthened the accounts he had with each of them.
As I explained in a book I co-authored some time ago, in an environment like this bankers have grown up as abacus bankers, record keepersof money flows who derive income from seigniorage, from the passive creation of money through interest bearing-loans and government-backed securities rather than from true banking, and from active risk management.