People love cheese and the thousands of different varieties that are out there for you to indulge yourself with. However, the value of cheese takes on a completely different concept when you venture over to a part of Italy.
Credem Bank in Italy has a rather unusual method of collecting collateral for a loan. They don’t look at your home, vehicle, or anything else as, for them, it is all about cheese.
However, they only seem to deal in one type of cheese, Parmesan. They accept cheese in return for loans that have interest rates between 3% and 5%, and they will then sell the cheese if the loan amount is not repaid within the time limit. They also charge a fee to make sure that the cheese will be able to mature correctly while it is in the bank vault. At the last count, they had 430,000 cheese samples in the vault, which has a market value of somewhere in the region of $200 million.