A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

to assume that money has some kind of intrinsic (or at least established) value. It hasn’t. The second is that money can be physically protected by putting it in a bank vault or someplace for safekeeping. It can’t.

To understand why not, you have to accept that money is nothing more than a symbol. The more money you move, and the faster you move it, the more symbolic it becomes: the harder it is to control its absolute value—or even its whereabouts. If big enough sums move from one place to another, and they move fast enough, they practically disappear.

Then, too, only the methods change in theft—not the concepts or the motives. People have been stealing since long before money was invented. But the more portable wealth becomes, the easier it is to steal; when cows were the medium of exchange, thieves had a real problem. With the advent of computers, however, cash has become so portable it barely exists, except as an electronic blip. I think of our age in high-tech banking as the Dawn of Fiduciary Symbolism—the era when money has become nothing more than tiny dots of light bouncing off satellites in space.

I should know how it worked; I was head of a group at the bank called Electronic Funds Transfer—or EFT. Our job was to move money, and there was a group like mine at every bank on earth that had a telex or a telephone. I knew what all these groups did, when they did it, and how they did it. I thought now that such knowledge might come in handy.

Naturally, you can’t squeeze physical money through a phone line. The wire transfers we handled were just memos from one bank, authorizing another bank to take money out of the first bank’s “correspondent account”—like writing a check. Most banks keep such accounts with other banks they regularly do business with; but if they don’t, they must handle these transfers through a third bank where both hold accounts.

In the United States alone, about three hundred trillion dollars a year are moved through the wire transfer systems in this fashion—more than the total assets of all the banks in the country added together. Those banks have no idea how much cash they’ve paid out until they close at the end of each day and add up the total wires they’ve received.

There are also many countries whose governments are uneasy that money can fly across the border without passing the customs officials for taxes to be levied. Who knows whether some Iranian is moving money from Salzburg to San Jose a dozen times a day—and how can something be regulated that’s happening with the confidentiality of a gentlemen’s handshake in a private club? The rules governing banking have been around for aeons; the rules about wire transfers fill a three-by-five note card. If any banking activity needed better security, this was it. That’s what I was banking on.

But like any banker with black ink in her veins, I never rushed blindly into new ventures. My grandfather, Benjamin Biddle Banks—Bibi—had taught me the rules of the game when I was four years old. “Always calculate the risk,” he’d said. Too bad he hadn’t followed his own advice. Bibi had owned a small chain of California banks he’d built from nothing. Though he was hardly in the same class as Wells Fargo, the Bank of America, or the Bank of the World, his little banks filled a need that no one else had met. Just after the great depression, when California was flooded with Hispanic migrant workers, Russian and Armenian immigrants, all looking for jobs, Bibi—through clever financing and unshakable principles—helped those people get on their feet, buy small plots of land for farms or ranches, and become the economic backbone that saved California from the fate suffered for decades by the rest of the civilized world.

In the 1960s, when conglomeration became a household word and my grandfather’s chain went public, a group of midwestern businessmen quietly bought up his stock and—not so quietly—forced Bibi into a nonvoting, advisory job on his own board, where he could watch the blatant pillaging of the institution he’d spent a lifetime to build. He died within the year. That was the day I decided—bloodlines or no—that banking wasn’t the career for me. I went to New York, studied data processing instead, and became a high-priced Manhattan technocrat.

It was the cruelest trick of a not-so-benevolent fate that the second company I worked for was bought in another leveraged buyout, just like the one that destroyed Bibi—but this time, by none other than the Bank of the World. I stayed for the transfer to San Francisco, because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: money and power and the highest position ever held by a female executive—or any twenty-two-year-old—in the entire history of the bank. I was so impressed that I’d stayed ten years.

But they still treated me as if I needed a teacher’s pass and an escort to go to the powder room. I’d sold my soul, and my grandfather’s hopes and dreams, for a lifetime of reflected glory and a bronze plaque with a title on my desk. Instead of reading “Verity Banks, Vice-President,” it should have read “The Whore of Banking,” I thought. But it was never too late to change the cards fate had dealt you. Bibi had told me that, too, and I thought he was right.

Furthermore, I now had the right cards up my sleeve.

My plan was to break through the automated security systems, get into the wire transfer system, and move some money to a place where no one could find it—then blow the whistle and point out to everyone how easy it had been.

A banker’s first responsibility is to safeguard the money that others entrust to him. If I could cut through bank security like a hot knife through butter, and get my hands on actual dough, it would not only freeze the sneer on Kiwi’s