Wouldn't it be nice if our money in the bank collected interest?

It'd be great if cities/communes could set interest rates, grant loans, and do all the things a real bank would.

oooh I would love that. Intrest, and what would happen if you could do inter city investment. Like since Celest has no villages, they can invest in Serenwildes's commshop or something.

Thing is, that would mean people can do the following:

* Put 50,000 gold in a bank account
* Go into torpor for 50+ years.
* Come back with 2,000,000 gold ready for 'em.

I am not sure whats wrong with that.

Right. If someone feels like waiting around for a couple of Real years worth of time to make a decent profit off of interest, then that's fine. Actually working for that time would make you far more than sitting and waiting anyway.

I think the main problem with that is that it causes a much stronger rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer scenario than we already have. People would buy credits, sell them, stuff them in the bank, get 'em out, and buy more credits back. I should think one would have to work for a profit, not just stuff it away and never bother with it.

You forget that money in the game comes from no where and often, leads to nowhere. especially the large funds. So while intrest would increase inflation where a few years down the line Credits will be 6K, hoarding the money in the bank will also reduce current prices, making gold now worth more than gold later. But thats the idea behind intrest anyways.

And there is a very simple reason the rich get richer, they were able to get rich in the first place for a reason.

If you act rich you can be rich

I believe the original banks in history were just de facto safe deposit boxes that charged a fee for keeping your money safe. And like many fee-based checking accounts before interest checking became profitable through technological improvements, they also were made to provide the convienience of being able to go to any branch and get your money rather than having to haul your life savings around to every city you visit. (Indeed, this is how currency got its start. In early US history, much of the currency was issued by private banks as a sort of "IOU" for the gold you placed in the bank for storage.) In exchange for this service, they charged a fee. This is essentially how the IRE banks are. Society has not advanced to the point we have IRL with fractional reserve lending.

So what happened in more modern centuries is that banks looked at this pile of wealth sitting in their vaults doing nothing and asked, "What could we do with this?" The answer was: "Lend it to people who want it and bring in interest payments." People depositing money in the banks are not going to like that since it poses a risk of loss in case too many people default on the loans, so they decided to share a part of the profits with the depositors. Thus modern banking, and thus the source of where your interest actually comes from.

What this means is that in-game banks cannot give interest unless there is coded a bank loaning system, which is impossible. Every player player would simply make seconds to draw large loans, pass it on to thier alts, and then default on the loan. This in turn would have to mean massive bank failures causing everyone to lose their life savings. This is like the bank crashes of the Great Depression when banks lending money to bad business ventures had their life prolonged with government bailouts for the sake of "stability", which snowballed the loans and investments for failure ventures and resulted in more even chaos than stability. That would probably be analogous to how things would result in a modern banking system here since there is no way for the computer to distinguish a safe loan vs. a high risk one, and so it'd be lending like crazy to high risk borrowers until everyone's savings were obliterated.

Unless you had a finance ministry in charge of giving loans. Then you'd have humans making the decisions. Still would be no real way to enforce loan repayment, though, so it wouldn't much matter. All loans would be high-risk.

I kinda imagined, that the banks would be giving out loans to people like Bob, or the Casino runners, or village leaders and the like.

A city can still give out loans without any code needed, they have treasurers and trade ministers

It would be kinda neat if players could run banks... that way loans and interest could exsist.

But some mechanics like a shop 'bank' would be needed... since it would be to expensive to draw from a city bank to do this, and I know if I knew a banker was walking around with peoples life savings, I would get my freindly Moondancer and rip him off and split the amount...

It would be very easy for the city itself to act as a bank.

The trade minister is able to withdraw money from its account. He can then give money to players who have to give money back with a percentage of intrest. The city could also take money given to the city leader to "play the credits market" giving profit to the player who gave him money.

It wouldn't be hard if someone wanted to take the risk.

See I would love to operate a bank that doesn't reley on the city at all, a chance for those of us who took econmics and banking courses can get rich off :-p

considering the -large- number of people who could find success in running a bank, I don't see how getting in with the city/commune you live in would limit your profit potential.

Isn't that the way "non-profit" orginizations work anyways?

your actually making me think, maybe I should do this. Unfortunatly Daganev is no where smart enough to do it...

p.s. I have loved the amount of times I have "screwed myself over" becasue I've been too dumb to know better. makes the game very enjoyable.

Sorry I didn't realise it was that complex. When I thought of it. I thought of that game neopets. Last time I played they just had a button to push to collect your interest for the day.

Also, if economy were made too complex the whole 'ratting' concept wouldn't work, as there would be no viable reason for ratcatchers to have that much gold on hand given the state of the economy at that point.

I suppose someone could make themselves a bank.
You invest money in them, they use it to make more money, and then they give it back with intrest. The banker, in theory, makes more money than the intrest is, so he makes a profit too.
So guys, if you wanna invest some money in me, go ahead