A promising sign. "Thank you, ma'am."

"Want to go to the bank after lunch, then? It's not that far, but I think it's still a bit too far for Alfirin to bike. We could walk, I guess, and drop off a tupperware for Miss Enderbridge along the way?"

"We can do this."

"Alfirin, does that sound good to you?" 

"I think so. What is a bank?"

"It's a place that holds onto your money for you and keeps it safe! I keep some money in bills, but most of my money is with the bank. I have a debit card," she has her handbag beside her and can pull it out and show them, "that I can use at stores, and it tells the bank to send the money to the store. Also you can put your money in a savings account, and you can't spend it from there - you have to move it to the other account and it takes a day or two - but the bank gives you interest on it, which means they add a little bit more money every year." 

"... They keep your money safe for you, and they always give it back, and they give you more money?" That sounds incredibly fake.

"Banks are not just America. In other places they not give you more money though. You give them money, for keeping the money safe."

"That makes sense."

And, switching to Taldane with an eye on Evelyn to see if she gets angry, "And in other places they're run by the church of Abadar. I don't know how you'd trust it in a place where there are no priests chosen by the gods."

"Well if the bank gives money, then maybe it is run by a very rich honorable eunuch, and you know they will not steal because they already have more money than they need."

" - maybe. But it seems like a strange thing for a very rich honorable person to do. Funding libraries, that makes sense, I can imagine the kind of rich honorable person who'd do that, but why give money to people who already have money but entrust it to you?"

"I think the bank can pay interest because they invest the money? Which means, uh - I should really get someone who knows more about this to explain it properly, but basically, because they have so much money from all the people who put their money in savings accounts, they can use it to make loans to people - like people buying houses, say - and those people pay back the loan plus extra, and they can take a little bit of that extra and give it to people with savings accounts as interest. It's not a lot of interest, it's like 0.1% - uh, a thousandth of the money I have in there total, that they add in extra at the end of the year. If you put it in a proper investment account it's usually more, but it's also more risky because if the economy goes down you might end up with less." 

"So the bank does not keep your money for you, they give it to other people and then only give a thousandth back?"

"...No, if you go to the bank and say you want to take all of your money out of the savings account, they'll give it back to you, plus the little bit extra they added while they were holding onto it for you. I think they can do that because they're usually really good at guessing how many people are going to take money out most years, so they know much has to be available and not loaned out, and they're careful about who they make loans to - if you want to buy a house, you need to give them all sorts of paperwork and information on how much you earn at your job, and stuff, because they want to only make loans to people who'll definitely pay them back. ...Sometimes banks do make mistakes and run out of money, and then it's really bad for everyone who put their savings there, but that doesn't happen very often, and nowadays the government will give the banks some of their money if they make a mistake like that, because it's so bad for the country when a bank runs out of money." 

"...Say again slower? You give the bank a thousand dollar, the bank gives the thousand dollar to someone to buy a house, then you ask for your money back and...they give you a thousand dollar and one dollar? Where do they get the thousand dollar and one dollar? From other person who gives money to bank?"

"That's pretty close to right, I think! It's more complicated than that, but - here, I'm getting paper." 

Evelyn brings over a piece of paper and quickly draws ten stick figures on it, and then a stylized building with a B on it. "Okay. All of the actual numbers here are made up, but - this is the bank. Let's say there are ten people and they all have a thousand dollars in savings - they have more than a thousand dollars total, and they're working and earning money to pay for their food and their house, the thousand dollars is the money they don't expect to need this year unless there's an emergency, like if they lose their job or their house burns down or their child gets sick. That happens sometimes, but most people won't have a bad thing like that happen to them on a particular year." 

She draws arrows from the ten hasty stick figures to the bank building. "So now the bank has ten thousand dollars, yeah?" Off to the side, she adds another stick figure and a smaller house-drawing. "Now, someone else comes to the bank and says, I want to buy a house and I need five thousand dollars, but I don't have that many dollars, so I want to borrow it. The bank says, okay, but you have to pay it back with 5% interest, five parts in a hundred - the way they calculate interest on mortgages is pretty complicated, but we can say it's just 5% on the whole amount, which on five thousand is, uh - fifty times five, that's $250. The bank says, okay, we'll loan you five thousand dollars, and you need to pay it back over five years with extra - so a thousand and fifty dollars every year. They ask a lot of questions to make sure the person can afford to pay a thousand and fifty dollars a year, and if they can, they lend them the money."

She draws a dollar-sign and arrow going to the house. "Now the bank is getting an extra fifty dollars a year! They only have to spend ten of those dollars to give all the people with savings their one-thousandth in interest. And they only lent out five thousand, so even if it's a really unlucky year and three of the people need all of their savings, the bank can give them back their money. ...And the other thing is that the loan is backed by the house itself. So even if the person who took the loan can't afford to pay it back and runs away, now the bank has their house and can sell it. Does that make sense? In general, I mean, not the exact numbers, I just came up with stuff for those." 

"Oh, the bank takes the money for houses back. I didn't understand that before. I thinked the bank gived people money for houses as a gifts. Like the president."

"No! I see why you were confused, that definitely wouldn't work. I think banks make other kinds of investments too, but mortgage loans are the easy to explain version. The person taking a loan wants to, even though it costs more in total, because otherwise they would have to save for years and years before they could buy a house, and the bank wants to make loans because they get the extra. ...The extra is more than that, too, I definitely paid more in interest. I think it's actually 5% every year on the whole amount you still owe? So it would be $250 the first year, when you owe the whole $5000, but you also pay back $1000 of it so the second year you only owe the bank $4000 and the interest is $200." 

She shakes her head slightly. "Anyway, picture that, but the bank has savings from millions of people, and makes loans for thousands and thousands of mortgages." 

"And the people who work at the bank do not take the money because they are all honorable person with no childs? Or is it because the president will always find out and kill them?"

"Put them in a box," Iomedae corrects her.

"Even if they steal a thousand thousand people's money they just get put in a box?"

"If you kill them, they go to Hell. If you put them in a box....probably they get old, then go to Hell. But maybe they can fix it?"

Aughhhh the conversation is veering off into Weird Directions again before Evelyn can formulate her answer. Evelyn does not really want to talk about how the US prison system relates to Hell, though - probably there is some advantage? Like, at the very least, maybe someone who spends twenty years in prison eventually thinks about their life choices and decides to be a better person? ...Evelyn kind of thinks that isn't what she's heard about prison, and often people come out worse, but that's probably less true at the kind of federal prison for white-collar financial crimes. 

"...I think mostly the bank makes it really hard for someone who works there to steal a lot of money? Like, this isn't really it - they do it all on computers now - but you could imagine they keep the money in a vault with ten locks, and the keys belong to ten different people, so no one person could decide to steal the money, and it'd be hard to get all ten people to agree to it because there are cameras watching the vault and they would probably get caught? ...The bank probably also does a lot of checking whether someone is, uh, an honorable sort of person who won't do crimes, before they hire them for a job where they would have an opportunity to take a lot of money? But there are thousands of people who work at the bank and most of them just don't have much opportunity because there are - lots of locks, except on computers." 

"Okay. I think I understand bank and we can walk to the bank after lunch."