As often as some folks might see all this talk of debt, finances and financial instruments as overwhelmingly modern, the truth is that ever since we’ve started putting seeds in the ground, we’ve had a need to do more than just barter. Money, in the shape of a useful commodity, is multiple thousands of years old, which naturally means that laws around debt, contracts and payments are nearly as old as well.
The law code of Hammurabi, often considered the first codified legal system around, has multiple examples of property laws, including provisions for limiting debt collections from drought-hit farmers.
It even specifies that the draught-victim would be immune from both debt repayment and interest repayment for a year. One has to imagine that this specificity was needed as folks interested in making money however they can have been around since the conception of civilization itself.
There were even rules about investments, “If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum,” which would fit right in with any amount of “Wall street memes,” given that, like the titular Wall street of old, these were used in places with actual walls.
Incidentally, that is the actual origin of Wall street’s name, it was quite literally the street adjacent to the city wall in 17th century New Amsterdam. It was also a place where early merchants and traders would sell shares and bonds, unaware that this action would continue in this exact same place for the next three hundred years at a scale they could never have imagined.
Money tends to attract money, which goes both for compound interest and financial institutions and business to flourish together. While recently Silicone valley has given it a run for its money, no pun intended, as far as gatherings of massive capital go, the name Wall street remains synonymous with money. And, as with nearly everything, humans take these ideas and hammer them down into memes.
