David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…The reason it was named Bank of Italy was it was started by an Italian immigrant who wanted to create something for the underbanked Italians in his California community. Yeah, mostly farmers and merchants in San Francisco. It really started as the bank of the little guy. Bank of America decides that they are going to mail out little rectangular pieces of plastic to every single one of their 65,000 customers in the city of Fresno, completely unsolicited. A couple of things about this. (1) It's wild. I think the Fresno population at this point in time was maybe 200,000–250,000 people. A huge portion of the city of Fresno banked with Bank of America, and that was true for all of California at the time. (2) They just send these things out. Obviously, these are credit cards. People don't know what they are, they have no idea how to use them, mass chaos ensues. Certainly, nobody asked for them. There's this great quote again from A Piece of the Action that describes it and says, “There had been no outward yearning among the residents of Fresno for such a device, nor even the dimmest awareness that such a thing was in the works. It simply arrived one day with no advance warning as if it had dropped out of the sky.”…

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