On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, Terence Etchells wrote:
> I am interested in list members views on this recent event.  If you do not
> wish to email the list then email me directly.  Please email even if you
> unconcerned (just hit the reply (not reply to all) and send button).

My family had a small amount of money.  And we did a small amount of
building houses and storefronts.  We went to a small "savings & loan",
something similar to a bank but with slightly different legal rules, for
those of you who are not in the U.S.  We took all our money there.  We got
to know the president there.  We got to know the employees there.  They
got to know us.  We did all our business with them.  And when it came time
to ask for a loan we were dealing with people who knew us.  They would
give us the loan and we would repay them.  We would ask for a larger loan
and the process would repeat again and again.  We remodeled houses and
built apartments and in the end even built small shopping centers with
that.  Then the 1980's came along. Small savings and loan institutions
were bought by national institutions.  Others were shut down by the
government, even though they were not in nearly as much trouble as others
or they were not a tiny fraction of the money at risk as some of the big
banks.  And we went to ask for a loan.  But nobody there knew who we were. 
And they had rules to follow.  And we went home, without the money.  The
project would have succeeded, the money would have been repaid.  But we quit.

Since that time we have seen a very large bank in the area have a memo
passed down through the ranks directing loan officers "to distance our
institution from smaller and less desired lines of credit."  With each
transmission of the memo to the next level the directions became more
predatory.  By the time it got to the loan officers at the bottom it
resulted in the operating lines of credit for hundreds of small companies
being cancelled one morning.  Anonymous interviews with bank employees
after this was over yielded things like "we don't really know how the
original memo turned into cutting off the money needed by all the small
companies to keep operating."  Many of those companies needed that to run.

And I spent a decade working for a large company who acquired small
companies and later dumped them, some of them fine little companies, who
were just ground up and lost in the normal day to day operation of a
company a hundred times their size.  I watched a venture spend millions of
dollars to begin something and later a person was given a very nice oak
and brass plaque for her managing to recoupe a total of twenty thousand
dollars from the sale of all the equipment and supplies. 


I sincerely hope that the future of the fine people who have brought us
Derive will be bright and successful.  I hope the product continues to
thrive and improve.  I will always remember the terrific support that I
have received from them.  They have even made a few modest enhancements 
that I have made a case for.

Don Taylor


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