Wealth & Money Quote by John Buchanan Robinson

Banking looks like cash in motion; Robinson strips it down to something more slippery: trust packaged as a product. His line lands because it refuses the comforting picture of banks as vaults that simply hand out deposited money. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the modern bank is already a machine for creating claims on the future - deposits, notes, loans - all resting on confidence that everyone will not demand “real” money at once. “Nowadays” is the tell: he’s marking a historical shift from a world where lending feels tethered to tangible specie to a world where the core commodity is credibility.

As a politician, Robinson’s intent is less to romanticize finance than to reframe it for public judgment. If banks are “lending credit,” then their power is not merely technical; it’s political. Credit determines who gets to expand, who gets to survive a bad season, who gets priced out. The subtext is accountability: if a bank’s business is effectively manufacturing permission to act economically, then the public has a stake in how that permission is granted, and at what risk.

The phrase “amounts, nowadays” also carries a faint warning. Credit is efficient, expandable, and dangerously contagious. When confidence holds, it fuels growth; when it breaks, the whole edifice can seize up. Robinson’s quiet cynicism is that what we call money in a modern economy is increasingly a story we agree to believe - until we don’t.