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My girlfriend showed me a music remix of a viral video where a woman says that she is looking for a man in finance who is 6' 5", has blue eyes, and is affiliated with a trust fund. This got me thinking: What does a man in finance do? What is finance even? What service does this "man in finance" provide that this woman needs to access? After some thinking and reading, I've decided to try my hand at explaining what is finance. Finance seems to be the study of how to keep track of who owns what, and a financial system seems to be a system that keeps track of who owns what. In the early prehistoric days, the financial system was quite simple: You own what you can defend. If you thought you owned a nice rock, you kept track of it by holding it and attacking whoever tried to take it. Trading ownership meant handing your rock to another caveman, and simultaneously they would hand you a fish or something you wanted to trade for. These were simple times, but you could onl...