From Lottie Durling's journals, circa 1924 AD:
"[My husband] Harold put up ice in the winter, hauling it from Lime Lake for our family's use. Then folks began buying it from us. Blanche Wenig came on horseback and took it home in a sack. Eleven-year-old Ansel Fellows picked up a load with a one-horse wagon.
So Harold built an ice house and began delivering to nearby towns. Children would come to buy a few pennies’ worth. But there was an elderly couple in Fayette for which Harold felt sorry, because they seemed to have to be so tight with their little bits of money. He always give them a little more than they could pay for. Harold once mentioned this to our neighbor Merv Berlin who replied, “Don’t you know the Ackers have mortgages on most of our neighbors’ farms!?”
So Harold built an ice house and began delivering to nearby towns. Children would come to buy a few pennies’ worth. But there was an elderly couple in Fayette for which Harold felt sorry, because they seemed to have to be so tight with their little bits of money. He always give them a little more than they could pay for. Harold once mentioned this to our neighbor Merv Berlin who replied, “Don’t you know the Ackers have mortgages on most of our neighbors’ farms!?”
Turned out to be true. The entire town was in hock to the Ackers, who, as mortgagees (but unlike 2010 AD holders of toxic CMOs*) held real, tangible, deliverable collateral.
Aaah, markets and finance vehicles -- so much simpler in those times, but the people behind them? Not much new.
* CMO = Collateralized Mortgage Obligation - Broke Girl's imprecise micro-definition: Mortgages smashed together into inedible mis-matched garbage-salads presented prettily on fine China (by self-important Wall Streeters in Armani) so as to appear as delectable cuisine."What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." -- 250 BC**
[Note: CMOs, in and of themselves, are simply an object--a financial instrument allowing for convenient packaging and exchange of mortgages. Just like cash or stocks, or bonds, CMOs have no morality, rightness, or wrongness, goodness or badness. The bad rap, per my definition above, comes about by self-interested tactics that became commonplace in the oughts. Because Harry did it, it was okay for Marlene to do it.) Follow me?
** Biblical reference: Ecclesiastes 3:2