Text│ Shan Lingyi
In the 1990s, when Pudong was developing and opening up the environment, finance became a topic of concern to everyone, and people had a lot of new understanding of banks, ICBC Shanghai Branch invited nearly 50 well-known writers in Shanghai to write their stories with banks, and published the book "Writers and Banks". Writers, as ordinary citizens, talk about the banks in their eyes, talk about their relationship with the banks, and share interesting stories about them and the banks, which are still enjoyable to read today. In order to let the majority of readers enjoy these famous stories together, we have specially set up a column of "Finance" as a "Talk Club" to invite you to warm up the "old" with us.
Author: Li Qigang
writer
Pen name Antarctica. He is the author of the novel "Strand Tide", the novella "Floating Clouds and Dogs", and the poem "Rubik's Cube, Building Blocks and Others". In 1998, he launched the national "New Concept Essay Competition" with his peers.
The first time I dealt with a bank counter was in a small, small bank. At that time it was called the XX Savings House. I was fourteen or fifteen years old. For some reason, I occasionally passed by the savings office and occasionally learned about a way of saving called "decals". This way of saving is very tempting for me. First, it's very specific, it's not like regular or current savings, giving you a certificate of deposit or passbook that lacks a pattern. The decal gives you a small piece of paper similar to a normal stamp, and the edge of the piece of paper also has a jagged hole like the stamp, and the pattern is also beautiful. This kind of very specific thing is quite attractive to fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. Second, its face value is very small, and the smallest is only one yuan. Post one card a month, paste 12 sheets a year, you can withdraw a sum of interest. I have forgotten exactly how much interest there is. Maybe one yuan, maybe two yuan, but what it stimulates me is definitely not the amount of interest, but the discovery of interest. I suddenly learned a way that money can make money, and it excites me. Many years later, I came to understand the deeper reasons that made me so excited: material deprivation and the hyper-stability of prices. Onions, a penny a small stall; soy milk three cents a bowl; with fish, the widest three corners of the unbridled, the narrowest one corner of a pound; edamame, regardless of the off-season and high season, are one corner three pounds ...
I was determined to carry out the first financial activity of my life behind the back of an adult. My breakfast went from a sweet flatbread for 4 cents to a light flatbread for 3 cents, a bowl of salty pulp for 5 cents to a bowl of light slurry for 3 cents; I got up half an hour earlier every morning to save money and run to school... In this way, at the cost of mouth and sleep, I exchanged a small piece of paper every month - decals. The decals of that year also seemed to bear the "supreme directive" that encouraged me to do so: to make a revolution in thrift.
Unfortunately, such a young sprout of my financial consciousness soon died because I went to the mountains and went to the countryside. It has been many years since I renewed my relationship with banks and with the financial industry.
Later, after going to college, he became a literary editor after graduation, and he was a cultural person. My head was filled with humanitarianism, root-seeking, modernist postmodernism, pseudo-modernism, stream-of-consciousness Dadaist Futurism, García Márquez-Flanders Simon Robleg Greyer... My colleagues and I enthusiastically call for reform in our work, in the pulpit, but we have not left a place in our heads and in our lives for the financial industry, which is crucial in reform. In fact, it's not clear what reforms will ultimately bring to our personal lives, especially our economic status.
At that time, I was very contemptuous of banks, and banks, that is, places where money was dealt with, were places where Grande and Sherlock did not see each other for a day. How many of those cultural giants often deal with banks or money banks? Articles are always poor before work, so there is "Dream of the Red Chamber", with Nietzsche said: maintaining mild poverty should be blessed, with Su Dongpo's "out of the public opinion, the opportunity to be paralyzed, the cave house to clear the palace, the medium of cold and heat; the eyebrows of the moth, the axe of the cutting; the crisp and thick, the medicine of the rotten intestines"... Who of them doesn't have a wary eye for the rich and the rich? Isn't it just two "Ge" fighting around "Jin"? And isn't the bank synonymous with money?
While I despise the banking industry, the first generation of rich giants in our megacity are emerging at the door of the bank.
Their common name at that time was "piling mold". From distant frontiers and villages, they brought one travel bag after another of treasury bills, and then cashed the treasury bills from the bank, and the difference between the village and the urban treasury bills quickly inflated their pockets...
People can have a thousand reasons to despise them and ignore them, but they don't think so.
People always have to learn how to live uprightly in a market economy, just like our foreign prophets and colleagues, such as Balzac, Hemingway, Faulkner... Banks, on the other hand, are schools, bridgeheads and beaches that we must not leave when learning to survive, which will always give you unexpected knowledge, surprises and splendid financial landscapes.
A while ago, when I met my peers, I asked: Did the bank buy the 10-year treasury bond?
If you buy it, your earnings will be around 25% today (after three months). No wonder Kissinger said: Men are only concerned with two things, war and interest rates. Of course, we can also add that we also care about Balzac...
This article was published in the 1996 issue of Writers and Banks.
The editor has something to say:
When it comes to treasury bills, I believe everyone must be familiar with them. In 1981, China issued bonds for the first time under the name of "Treasury Bills", and the birth of Treasury Bills gave the capital market an investment variety with a very high safety factor and could overcome inflation, which was of great significance in the history of China's reform and opening up.
At present, the treasury bonds issued by the Ministry of Finance are mainly divided into two types: savings treasury bonds and book-entry treasury bonds. The most popular is the savings treasury bond, which can be divided into two types: certificate type and electronic type. The purchase of treasury bonds is generally purchased through bank channels, among which electronic savings treasury bonds can be purchased offline, that is, at the bank counter, or purchased online banking, while voucher-type savings treasury bonds can only be purchased through bank counters.
The official public number of "Shanghai Bank Museum".