Viewing the Feb 4, 1911 Gazette you cannot fail to notice the tall advertisement dead centre at the bottom of the front page.

That advert is for Dow, Fraser & Co. a Vancouver company that pays interest on deposits. They use the deposits to invest in First Mortgages. There is a record at Heritage Burnaby for a picture in the City of Burnaby Archives of one of Dow and Fraser’s offices.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see advertisements for Financial Services in publications of today, given the rise of importance of that industry in the past 40 years, but they weren’t something I expected to see in a rural newspaper from over a century ago.

Using depositors’ money to invest in Mortgages was the basic investment strategy at the centre of the financial crisis that happened in 2008. Funny how even though it’s been something done for over a century groups of smart people can still be blinded by greed so much as to let a simple concept go so wrong. But then the basic human hasn’t changed all that much in that period.

Most people would have noticed the first things the newspaper talked about: Hockey and Politics.

If you want to see what they had to say about that you can read it in the really Old Newpapers.