Monday, April 11, 2016

An Excellent Sketch on Usury

Here is one part of many in a most readable essay:
I mention all the historical objections to usury because it has been a religious and moral issue in different eras or cultures right up to the present, but not in the modern day Western culture until very recently. Modern Westerners had mostly dispensed with the notion of usury after President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, but ever since the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 there has been a new, deep, and abiding sense of moral outrage at banks. This is not so much a religious idea as a political and moral attitude, in my opinion, but it is pressuring banks (especially Too-Big-To-Fail or TBTF banks) to justify their existence and purpose, and they have been coming up short in the great debate. U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has said, "The business model of Wall Street is fraud."
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