Before electronic banking, how did wealthy businessmen keep track of their earnings?
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Pages of each day’s newspaper had the stock prices for most large stocks. Open, high, low, close, change and volume.
Wait till you learn about the ticker tape. You know that scrolling text on cnbc with all the tickers and prices – well those used to get printed out on a long tape of paper
Bookkeepers out the ass. Redundancies on top of redundancies.. kinda like disinformation and flushing a turd to see where it pops out. They didn’t get wealthy by being un-clever.
People are talking about doing math with pencil and paper (or with calculators or adding machines) which is a part of it, of course.
But as for things like keeping track of current stock prices, commodity prices, bond and interest rates, those values were published in newspapers at the end of each day. Especially wealthy and well-connected traders would have stock tickers — physical printers connected to telegraph lines that would print out the latest market prices continuously. They would also have men (they were always men back then) calling up brokerages on landline telephones, once those became a thing.
The “Stock ticker” apps and websites are called that because of the ticking sounds the teleprinters made banging out the numbers.
When I started in insurance, we used spreadsheets… Paper spreadsheets. 11×17″ paper with rectangular grid. You put one digit per rectangle and you could construct free form calculations. I did large group underwriting. We would set rates based on the recent experience of the employer.
Later, I would see calculation sheets laid out by actuaries and filled in by clerks with calculators to calculate tables of rates and reserve factors. One pricing memo from 1966 which I had occasion to review 20 years later, opined that it would take “65 girl hours” to calculate all the rates for a new form.
ETA: Bonds used to have physical coupons. To collect your semi-annual interest, you had to cut out the coupon and present it to a bank. As a fundraiser for charity, my company used to sell worthless, pre-Revolution Russian paper bonds denominated in rubles with the coupons still attached.
Also people could to a bank and have something called a passbook filled out for them, which would be the equivalent of an account statement for their records
Had an elderly weird aunt in the family who kept her money in a half dozen or more local banks. She used the bus to go to every bank, every weekday, and had them add in the interest earned onto her passbooks. (yes, she had substantial deposits)
They would convert it to gold coins and keep it in a giant vault in the back yard so they could swim in it.
With documents. Banking is actually a pretty ancient industry. They’ve known how to keep track of assets, capital, interest etc. for a very long time now.
As explained to a 5yo- “Timmy pay attention in math class, you might become a wealthy businessman and need to keep track of your earnings.”
As explained to you- Math, more precisely accounting.
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