This all leads to an interesting question. When New Yorkers saw the first automobile roll down the street in the nation’s financial capital, how many predicted that the invention would lead to the creation of new jobs in the financial sector? The route from the combustion engine to consumer credit was indirect and unfolded over time, bolstered in no small part by other intervening inventions and business processes such as Henry Ford’s assembly line, which made possible the mass production and thus the cheaper and broader availability of automobiles.
