LONDON — Finance is such a picturesque business, but nobody seems to notice.

Once upon a time, for instance, all that you needed to start a bank was a bench. You put your bench up in a square in medieval Italy and sat down behind it to do business. The Italian for bench is banca, and hence our modern word bank.

Sometimes, of course, bankers would run out of money, and when they did — in an age before the invention of TARP, bailouts and Ben Bernanke — their bench would be ceremonially smashed in front of them. It was then a “broken bench” or “banca rotta” or “bankrupt.” Though trading terminals may be sturdy things, this is the sort of personalized and decisive action that I’m sure we all hope to see from Janet Yellen and her ax.

Money is filled with these strange images, if we only look for them.

My point here is the eternal poetic inventiveness of the financial mind. Popular opinion has it that bankers think of nothing but profit. But their brains are fixated on poetic invention. Money seems to be a side issue. And if modern poets had half the linguistic inventiveness of the modern banker, they would sell more books. More.

See: The New York Times