“Actually,” he continued, “the risk involved in telling you this is minimal, because if you leaked it to anybody they wouldn’t believe you. I’m not sure they’d even believe me. Or the President of the United States, for that matter. When you actually come face to face with the true story, it’s so completely incredible that you could publish it in the
Mr Gleeson scratched his ear slowly and gently, as if this was a very delicate and difficult feat to perform and required all his concentration. Then he leaned forward.
“So that you can understand what I’m going to say,” he continued, “I’d better just fill you in on the history of this firm’s most important client. You don’t need me to tell you that that’s the National Lombard Bank. It’s a very old bank; in fact it’s the oldest bank of all. To be honest with you, nobody knows exactly when it was founded; it started off as a large number of silver pennies in a sock belonging to an Italian merchant who was too fat to go to the Crusades in person, but was alive to the fantastic commercial opportunity they presented. These silver pennies bred many other silver pennies during the Siege of Jerusalem that the sock was too small to contain them all, and the Italian merchant, or his grandson or whoever it was, built a bank instead and kept them in that. Spiritually, however, the whole organisation remained a sock, and a sock it is to this day. Remember that, and you’ll understand a lot about how banks work.”
“For reasons best known to itself, the sock left Lombardy early in the fourteenth century and migrated to the cities of the Hanseatic League, where it went to live with some people called Fugger. They were kind to the sock and fed it lots of silver pennies, until almost all the silver pennies in the world were either in the sock permanently or else indefeasibly linked to it by a series of binding legal agreements. The more people tried to take money out of the sock, the more money ended up in there, and although everyone complained bitterly about this state of affairs, none of them realised that the only way to break the vicious circle was not to take money out of the sock in the first place. Even now,” said Mr Gleeson, “the lesson has not been learned which is why the economic infrastructure of the developed nations is completely up the pictures.”
“Anyway,” continued Mr Gleeson, “the Fuggers were industrious men, and they weren’t content to let the sock do all the work. They were forever trying to think up new ideas for getting even more silver pennies from people, and one of them hit on a very simple but extremely effective concept. It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this.”
“The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium. But although everyone was soon convinced that the bets were totally respectable, the Fuggers were perfectionists and wanted to make absolutely sure, so they took to writing the bets out on extremely long pieces of parchment, frequently in Latin. This practice survives to this day; we call them policies, and usually they’re so completely and utterly respectable that it takes a couple of trained lawyers to understand what they mean.”
Jane nodded instinctively, for she had just renewed her car insurance. Mr Gleeson went on.
“Well,” he said, “if we can just fast-forward for a bit, the House of Fugger became Fugger and Company, which in turn became the Lombard National Bank, which turned into the National Lombard Bank plc. The name has changed, but the sock remains the same. In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking that the sock is the only truly immortal entity in the world. You would be wrong.”
Mr Gleeson paused and opened the top drawer of his desk, from which he extracted a packet of digestive biscuits. He offered one to Jane, who refused, and then ate one himself. Once he had cleared his mouth of crumbs, he continued.
