Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [110]
Banking on Fear
The banks are conventionally blamed for the persistence of usury. Given the difficulty of obtaining legal bank loans, an entire industry of lending agencies has appeared on the scene, printing advertisements in the newspapers and depositing flyers on the windshields of parked cars-anonymous approaches that implicitly also respect the rule of silence. But even these agencies cannot handle the many local merchants who have already begun the descent into a series of interlocking debts from which there is often no escape other than penury or suicide. By refusing to advance small loans to those without collateral, the banks have helped to create the conditions under which the only recourse is to usury, the very institution that will then make access to bank loans even more improbable-a dreadful quicksand from which few emerge.
The nervous preference for real estate over the uncertain value of cash is one obvious feature that even honest bankers share with mafiosi. But some bankers allegedly fit that image more fully still. Newly arrived in the local branches, they first entertain requests from relatively poor artisans and merchants from the neighborhood. They talk and jest with them, inserting a jocose question: "Do you have a piece of masonry? Do you have building stones?" Establishing that the visitors have nothing a bank could accept as collateral, the new manager dismisses these petitioners with unctuous regrets and good wishes. The jocular politeness of these exchanges actually disguises the fragility of the manager's position, since he will not stand up to a serious challenge. A jeweler, for example, told me that he simply told the manager to look at him and see in him a colleague for whom a loan would be as appropriate as it would be for the eminently respectable manager himself; and the manager, who had taken a liking to him (or at least understood the threat implicit in his emphasis on friendship and collegiality, agreed.
But the majority of artisans do not stand up for their rights, being intimidated by the manager's superior education and appurtenances of authority. They take themselves off, grumbling and unhappy. The manager then immediately invites promising prospects-those whose accounts are suspiciously large and active-to come in and discuss these accounts, to which he, alone aside from the customers themselves, has access. Settled in the privacy of a well-appointed office, he then remarks on the strangely impressive flow of funds into the clients' accounts; he delicately hints that he is aware that the source can only be usury and informs these clients that there are certain local artisans who are desperately in need of loans, which the bank cannot provide because the artisans have no property to offer as collateral. If these wealthy and distinguished customers would therefore simply help the poor artisans with loans-of which, it goes without saying, the bank manager would expect an appropriate percentage-no further investigation of their accounts would be necessary. He then sends the artisans to the usurers, explaining yet again that, as these poor applicants have no collateral, they represent an unacceptable risk for the bank, but that he just happens to know someone who might be able to help. The artisans do not tell the loansharks who sent them although the usurers know this already), and this delicate tact has perhaps contributed to creating a convenient fiction that such occurrences are rare. But most residents seem convinced that they are not rare at all. An