Banking and Marxism

Banking and Marxism

Fiction
edward w pritchard
draft 1

Through a series of ferocious Bank mergers there was a guy who ended up working in the basement of our Bank in an very old fashioned vault with only one large iron door and no windows. It was no longer used as a vault because it was not easily assessable to the brinks drivers and so we only kept papers and files in there, but there was security kept because there was a few thousand dollars of coins kept for an old use that had long since expired and the security compliance required that a person work in the vault.

The old guy who ended up his banking career working in the vault told me that he had once said a few controversial things, you know true statements, but things no one wanted to hear, and since he had been a bank officer once, rather than fire him, he had been sentenced to the vault. That was about 15 years ago and the people who had been mad at the old guy had long since moved on or cashed out and the old guy was forgotten by management, given a raise every year for doing not much and he continued in the position because he learned how to stand spending the day in a vault with no doors, windows or communications.


I got to know the old guy when I was Summer intern in the Commercial Loan Department and once had to go there to get a long forgotten Loan Covenant Agreement, which took awhile to find, so him and I talked as we looked, and later I would go back to see him to get career advice. I might add that he was very astute and had once been considered an up and comer I heard. One day after knowing him for 3 or 4 months he told me he had been secretly robbing the bank for over 12 years and giving the money to the Catholic Charities through the poor box at the church down the street.

Apparently one of his job duties was that if someone collected cash with a secondary market mortgage loan application the advance was to be sent to him to keep in the vault until the loan was approved by the appropriate government agency. We had about 1200 branches statewide then and if the mortgage market got active over low rates a large sum would come in from time to time, but it come in only in 300 or 400 hundred dollars increments which was insignificant in the scheme of things. The old guy told me he was able to get away with his charity work because he had started his banking career as a government bank examiner and as his work in the vault was not supervised he was able through diligence figure out a way to compile and report that no cash was ever collected and he offset his omissions by a small adjustment on the yield spread on each loan, which he documented in a report he did each quarter. At first he was nervous about this but over the years he ceased to be audited and figured it was god's way of allowing the charitable contributions from the Bank. I was amazed to learn that over the years he had donated $4.25 million to the poor box, this he knew this because he always kept detailed records a practice he had learned early in his banking career.

I never told anyone else about this, even as i was promoted several times at that same bank, because it seemed like justice to the Bank and it's stockholders for allowing someone to work in an airless vault without proper doors or windows and nothing significant to do all day. I know I am a little anti-business, but don't get me wrong I am no Marxist or anything like that.