The practice of charging interest on loans has been controversial since it was first mentioned in early recorded history. Lending is a powerful economic tool, vital to the development of society but ...it can also lead to disaster if left unregulated. Prohibitions against excessive interest, or usury, have been found in almost all societies since antiquity. Whether loans were made in kind or in cash, creditors often were accused of beggar-thy-neighbor exploitation when their lending terms put borrowers at risk of ruin. While the concept of usury reflects transcendent notions of fairness, its definition has varied over time and place: Roman law distinguished between simple and compound interest, the medieval church banned interest altogether, and even Adam Smith favored a ceiling on interest. But in spite of these limits, the advantages and temptations of lending prompted financial innovations from margin investing and adjustable-rate mortgages to credit cards and microlending. InBeggar Thy Neighbor, financial historian Charles R. Geisst tracks the changing perceptions of usury and debt from the time of Cicero to the most recent financial crises. This comprehensive economic history looks at humanity's attempts to curb the abuse of debt while reaping the benefits of credit.Beggar Thy Neighborexamines the major debt revolutions of the past, demonstrating that extensive leverage and debt were behind most financial market crashes from the Renaissance to the present day. Geisst argues that usury prohibitions, as part of the natural law tradition in Western and Islamic societies, continue to play a key role in banking regulation despite modern advances in finance. From the Roman Empire to the recent Dodd-Frank financial reforms, usury ceilings still occupy a central place in notions of free markets and economic justice.
A usury contract is a null and void contract whereby someone, using the condition of another’s misfortune or material hardship, lack of experience, recklessness, or dependency, obtains for himself or ...for a third party a benefit that is clearly disproportionate to what he or she has given or done in return or committed to give or do. The usury contract violates one of the basic principles of the law of obligations, which is the principle of equality of obligations, in other words, the equality of the value of mutual benefits of the contracting parties. Although the legal definition of the usury contracts (Law on Contracts and Torts, Article 141, paragraph 1) is comprehensive enough, it is not easy for the courts to decide whether one contract is usury or not, i.e. null and void. The subject of this paper is the analysis of the usury contracts through the current case law in the context of the justification of the existence of this institute in the legislation of Serbia, having in mind the division of opinions, and because as much as a party using a person’s difficult material situation is presented in a negative context, the contract of this type is nonetheless a product of the willing action of both parties. The topic of this paper is very sensitive and requires a reasoned methodological approach and analysis. The aim of the paper is also to encourage the affected party in the usury contract to enter into litigation to protect their rights.
Predatory lending: A problem rooted in the past that continues today.Looking for an investment return that could exceed 500 percent annually; maybe even twice that much? Private, unregulated lending ...to high-risk borrowers is the answer, or at least it was in the United States for much of the period from the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression. Newspapers called the practice "loan sharking" because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators in the ocean. State and federal governments finally adopted laws and regulations curtailing the practice, but organized crime took over much of the business. Lending to high-margin investors contributed directly to the Wall Street crash of 1929.Loan Sharksis the first history of predatory lending in the United States. It traces the origins of modern consumer lending to such older practices as salary buying and hidden interest charges. Yet, as Geisst shows, no-holds-barred loan sharking is not a thing of the past. Many current lending practices employed today by credit card companies, payday lenders, and providers of consumer loans would have been easily recognizable at the end of the nineteenth century. Geisst demonstrates the still prevalent practice of lenders charging high interest rates, especially to risky borrowers, despite attempts to control the practice by individual states. Usury and loan sharking have not disappeared a century-and-a-half after the predatory practices first raised public concern.
How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, this book shows that people in both these ...worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake. ; How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, this book shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake.
This article revisits a set of classic political, theological and economic scenes in the (early) modern debate on usury from Luther to Bentham. To summarize, I argue that this theory of usury – which ...polemically mobilizes counter-Aristotelian tropes of the breeding, reproduction and husbandry of money – might also be read as a theory of what Foucault famously calls pastoral power. If this debate nominally concerns the ‘repeal’ of the ancient prohibition against money-lending at interest, I argue that what is really at stake here is the pastoral production of a new theory of the subject as ‘human interest’: a self whose allegedly intrinsic self-interest expresses itself paradigmatically through financial interest. In conclusion, I situate this genealogy of human interest within the larger history of the self-interested, capitalist and indebted subject from Hirschman, through Foucault, to Lazzarato.
Starting in the twelfth century, usury became one of the immoral activities attributed to the Jews in Christian anti-Jewish propaganda. Jews became so commonly associated with usury in the ...Latin-Christian world that the word "Jew" itself became a synonym for "usurer", mainly in the texts of Christian exegetes. However, although this trope spread geographically and over time, it does not seem to have existed in al-Andalus.
In Islamic texts, while some examples associate ribā (usury) with Jews, it is equally attributed to Christians. Moreover, the practice of usury does not seem to have been used as an argument against the Jews in Muslim polemical literature. This article focuses on the Andalusī context, showing how the trope of the Jewish usurer did not take root in Muslim Iberia as it did among the Christians of the Peninsula. Of special interest are developments that took place in the Naṣrid kingdom, where several legal opinions (fatāwā) issued between the eighth/fourteenth and the ninth/fifteenth centuries reveal a concern among the population about loans at interest issued by Jews. The Naṣrid jurists, however, appear to have tolerated these interfaith activities.
This article equates the antics of Shakespeare's Shylock with Ponzi schemes in contemporary Africa. Given the paucity of literary works on Ponzi schemes, it focuses on Nigeria to invoke a ...correspondence between usury and Ponzi schemes, using the former as a metaphor philosophically to account for the latter. Its discoveries afford an intertextual critique of Nigerian author Femi Osofisan's Love's Unlike Lading, its prototype, Merchant of Venice, and Fires Burn and Die Hard. With the background of New Historicism and intertextual theories, this study reconceptualizes Shakespeare's Shylock as Ponzi schemes, which are economic wolves in the dress of a humanitarian lamb, as they take more than a pound of flesh from investors who are effectively complicit in their own predicaments. It signals a place for literature in the quest for authorities and cybersecurity professionals to rid Africa and cyberspace of get-rich-quick schemes.
PDF
