If you’re over 40, none of the following will require explanation. It’s literary canon, etched into your memory over countless summer days watching reruns, or days spent home “sick,” watching game shows in the morning and comedy reruns in the afternoon until your parents came home and you had to pretend that you hadn’t spent all day watching TV.
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But, OK, for the young people: There was once a TV show called The Beverly Hillbillies, about a poor mountaineer named Jed Clampett who, while shootin’ at some food, noticed a strange phenomenon. Up through the ground, he saw, come a-bubblin’ crude. (If you were singing those words while reading them, then it might be time to shift your retirement savings from a “growth” profile to an “income” profile.)
In a nutshell: Jed and his family became rich. Too rich for whatever hill they’d been billy-ing on. So the kinfolk said, “Jed, move away from there,” and they moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars.
(If you were singing those words while reading them, then it might be time for your next colonoscopy.)
Here’s what Jed did with the money, according to the show: He deposited it in the Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills. That’s it. That was his entire financial plan. That was his holdings — a passbook savings account in a Beverly Hills bank, run by an oily sycophant named Milburn Drysdale, who — along with his Locust Valley-lockjawed assistant, Miss Hathaway — spent the entire run of the series in a state of barely controlled panic, making sure Jed didn’t withdraw his money and put it in some other bank.
Drysdale even lived next door to the Clampetts, which is what bankers used to do when they wanted to keep an eye on their biggest depositor. That banks don’t even think about depositors anymore, much less move next door to them, is either a sign of wonderful financial innovation and progress, or an indication that we’ve all lost our minds.
Because what a banker did in those years was pretty simple. He took your money. He paid you some interest. Then he lent it out — to people he trusted or people with collateral, who (surprise!) were almost always the same people — at a slightly higher rate. The difference between the interest he paid you and the interest he got paid was what was known as “banking,” and it was why Milburn Drysdale, and the entire country, actually, was rich rich rich. It’s what financed the movie studios that paid the movie stars who put in the pools behind every house in Beverly.
Hills, that is.
I know, I know. That kind of simplicity seems so low-rent now. So boring. Compound interest! A banker who takes deposits! Snooze. Yawn. Banking these days is all about criss-cross swaptions and crypto wallets and mortgage bundles, practiced by sharpie quants with advanced math degrees and $9,000 suits, any one of whom would take one look at Milburn Drysdale and roll his eyes and wonder who, exactly, was supposed to be the ignorant rube — Milburn or Jed?
But the real question is this: Who would you rather bank with? Who would you trust with your money? Who, when it comes right down to it, would you prefer to see as secretary of the treasury? A guy who made his zillions running something called a macro hedge fund — whatever that is — or a guy who made his millions on the difference between interest paid and interest received?
We don’t give Milburn Drysdale enough credit, which is ironic, because he’s the one who defined credit — and creditworthiness — for most of Beverly.
Hills, that is.
He scratched out a living in a classic interest-rate play in which there were only two jobs that mattered. Job one: keep Jed Clampett happy and confident and maintain his trust. Job two: ruthlessly assess the creditworthiness of every loan applicant who wandered into his lobby and found himself on the receiving end of that merciless and inflexible gaze.
After all, if the Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills went broke, so did Milburn Drysdale. So did poor Miss Hathaway, who didn’t have the looks or the pizzazz to make it in the sexist world of banking 60 years ago. The entire financial ecology of that show — and, for a long time, of this country — was based on trust and terror. Jed’s trust in Milburn, and Milburn’s terror of being poor.
Not a bad system, when you think about it.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
