Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Shortly after the Norman conquest of 1066, my distant ancestor, Sir Norman (aka, Big Norm), bought his infant son Norman (aka, Little Norm) a ten Euro Norman Conquest bond paying 5% compound interest. Today that bond would be worth about 265,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars – and if the family had held onto it we could have afforded to buy everybody in the world a private Gulfstream 650 or custom outfitted Airbus A380.

Unfortunately enough, Little Norm cashed the bond on his 18th birthday and bought all of his friends mugs of mead instead.

How could our ancestors have been so thoughtless?

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