All right. So, I want to talk about the real estate. So let me start with mortgage lending. Mort means death in Latin. And so, they call that Mortuus vadium, dead pledge in ancient times. It's an old idea. The idea of collateral is very old that is, I'll lend you some money but you have to sign a contract saying I can get to sell your land or something if you don't pay me back and take the money out of that. Otherwise, lending couldn't happen. So that's an old idea. We have it as a verb. To mortgage something, to mortgage your house means to offer it as collateral for a loan. So when you get a mortgage on your house, typically it is to buy the house, the bank lends you the money to buy the house, but if you stop paying on the mortgage, they can reclaim the house. Maybe not all of it, they'll sell it and they'll take what's owed to them out of it and plus maybe some charges, and then you have the remainder. That's the idea. And mortgage lending is very important because they can lend to anybody, as long as they can value the house. You know, they don't have to really be able to value your trustworthiness to pay the money back. You could drop dead and they don't care, you're gone. You're not going to pay anything. The house is theirs. At least they count on it, on the house value that they can use to pay off what you owed them. So, the history of mortgage lending goes back at least to the Tang Dynasty in China. A little different back then in the Tang dynasty, they could impose fines on your relatives, as well. We don't allow that now in modern times. It's only you and your spouse who would both sign or sometimes we'll ask your parents to cosign. That makes it easier to get a mortgage, but they can't go to relatives who don't cosign anymore. The word mortgage became common in the English language in the late 18th century. And property law wasn't very well developed then. Because it wasn't even clear who owned property. Because there wasn't a system that was well established. So, if you look in newspapers from the 18th century, you'll see a lot of ads- personal ads placed there, claiming ownership of property. So, when you bought a house in 1750, you first would go through all the newspapers and see if there's any ad placed that says,"I own that house. This guy is cheating me." And then, I have papers to prove it, which would be documents drawn up by a lawyer. So you stay away. It was a mess, they didn't have; "Who owns this house." Well in Germany, in the late 19th century they had the idea of having a centralized and authoritative book called "The Grundbuch," that would list for the whole country who owns what. And when you bought and sold the property, you would have to send papers to the holders of the Grundbuch and they would change the ownership. That made it so much better that property now is clear, title to property is clear although it's still not completely clear, even in modern countries. So, because not everything- not all claims on the property get reported, but at least it's getting clearer.
