The halfling accountant Gerbin Silverglow's concerns had been justified.
When they heard that the Mistsea Trading Company wanted to withdraw a large amount of cash, the biggest bankers in the Kafhoka region immediately found themselves in a difficult position. As it turned out, though, Ivankov's lessons in psychology from Mr. Crow had come in handy. After the salespeople talked them around with their silver tongues, the bankers ultimately agreed to lend the money, swayed by the steadily climbing returns on their investments.
There was another reason the bankers didn't want to lend the money.
They knew the Mistsea Trading Company planned to use these liquid assets to pay dividends to investors in Class A commodities. In the words of these bigwigs who did "big business," that meant handing money to a bunch of poor wretches who were crazy for cash.
Their big clients would never have been interested in the small returns on Class A investments. They also clung to a stubborn sense of hierarchy: who did those poor wretches think they were, investing and making money in the same company as them?
As the bigwigs saw it, the poor should stay right where they belonged, living their whole lives by the rules set down by their betters, offering up everything they had to their superiors and sharing in the "glory" bestowed upon them.
There was no need to think too hard about it. For the cattle, greater wisdom only brought greater pain and despair.
Still, the Mistsea Trading Company had lowered the entry threshold for its Class A commodities to attract funds, and that had certainly opened the bigwigs' eyes.
Especially when these major shareholders received the full assessment reports from the trading company's Strategic Investment Department. To their astonishment, they discovered that when the poor wretches they'd considered