During a trip from Budapest to Berlin in 1990, Joakim Philipson made observations about a grey market trade between Rumanian Roma and Vietnamese guest students in Berlin. It was seemingly inexplicable how the two groups could enter into business relationships without a common language. This paper uses the narrative as a basis for a discussion and interpretation of conditional trust and validates classical economic value theory. As “...research on trust... is relatively diverse and multidisciplinary” (Dirks and Ferrin, 2001; Lewicki et al., 1998; both after Gordon, 2007), we are drawing on research in as diverse fields as sociology, game theory, anthropology, and classical economics to question the paradigm that is the basis of both transaction cost economics and relationship management. As such the paper is a narrative case used for conceptual discourse.