Abstract
IN HIS ESSAY ON DUTIES, MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO TELLS a story about Cato the Elder, a wealthy man renowned as a landowner, who lived a century before Cicero. One day, Cato was asked what the most profitable aspect of property ownership is. Cato answered, “Raising livestock with great success.” He was then asked about the second most profitable aspect of ownership. “Raising livestock with some success,” he answered. And what about the third most profitable aspect? “Raising livestock with little success.” And the fourth? “Raising crops.” Then his questioner asked, “What about money lending?” Cato replied, “What about murder?”1
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Notes
Cicero, An Essay on Duties 1.42, 2.25, cited by Jo-Ann Shelton, As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125–126.
See The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings (Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957), 65–67, 189–190, 302, 553, 802.
On civil regulation of usury, see Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilization (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1994, first published in 1933), 138–139.
See George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 189–190.
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 42.
Bertrand Gille, Histoire de la Maison Rothschild, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1965), 487, cited by Ferguson, 90.
Heinrich Heine, “Lutetia,” in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5 (Munich, 1971), 321ff., 353; quoted in Ferguson, 86.
James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3.
For more on federal efforts to encourage lending to minorities, see Helen Thompson, China and the Mortgaging of America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51–98.
For Goldman’s role in the housing bubble, see William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
For Deutsche Bank’s role, see Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010).
Goldman Sachs has been widely criticized for helping Greece hide its financial mess from the European Union, for which it earned $300 million in fees, according to Louise Story et al., “Wall St. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis,” The New York Times, February 13, 2010.
Sebastian Mallaby writes, “Hedge funds have a powerful reason to control risk better than banks, as we have seen: The majority of them have the manager’s own wealth in the fund, alongside that of their clients.” See More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 380–381.
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© 2013 Michael P. Federici, Richard M. Gamble, and Mark T. Mitchell
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Mitchell, B.P. (2013). Banking and the Modest Republic. In: Federici, M.P., Gamble, R.M., Mitchell, M.T. (eds) The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137093417_7
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