Download or read book Beggar Thy Neighbor written by Charles R. Geisst and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In Beggar 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 Neighbor examines 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.
Download or read book Defence of Usury written by Jeremy Bentham and published by . This book was released on 1837 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Finance Code written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book London s Triumph written by Stephen Alford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic story of the dazzling growth of London in the sixteenth century. For most, England in the sixteenth century was the era of the Tudors, from Henry VII and VIII to Elizabeth I. But as their dramas played out at court, England was being transformed economically by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. At the start of the century, England was hardly involved in the wider world and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened, which placed London at the center of the world stage forever. Stephen Alford's evocative, original new book uses the same skills that made his widely-praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world--trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible--the families, the guild members, the money-men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic, and desirable--are as interesting as any of those at court. Their ambitions fueled a new view of the world--initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which still resonate today.
Download or read book Usury written by Calvin Elliott and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Usury Interest and the Reformation written by Eric Kerridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003: In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas takes what most assume to be the orthodox Christian position when he condemns the practice of usury, which he defines as the charging a price for the loan of a sum of money. Yet, whilst this definition has become widely accepted by historians, it is clear from a close reading of contemporary texts, that by the Reformation, the situation was in fact much more complicated. Indeed, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Melanchthon was confidently to assert 'that which is interest is wholly different from usuries'. This book is the first systematic study of the practice of moneylending during the Reformation. Through the detailed examination of a variety of documents, it challenges the established views on usury and interest, providing a fresh interpretation that explains how figures such as Luther could condemn usury whilst still upholding the legality of lending money at interest. Divided into two parts, the first half of the book provides a background to the subject, putting forward Professor Kerridge's arguments about usury and interest in the context of the Reformation. The second part of the book presents selections from 38 contemporary documents on the subject (in both the original language and English translation) written by key Reformation figures such as Calvin, Luther and Zwingli. As such, this book will be useful as both a research and reference work
Download or read book Jihad written by Gilles Kepel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kepel has traveled throughout the Muslim world gathering documents, interviews, and archival materials, in order to give readers a comprehensive understanding of the scope of Islamist movements, their past, and their present. 7 maps.
Download or read book Loan Sharks written by Charles R. Geisst and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 early decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers called the practice “loan sharking” because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators in the ocean. Slowly state and federal governments adopted laws and regulations curtailing the practice, but organized crime continued to operate much of the business. In the end, lending to high-margin investors contributed directly to the Wall Street crash of 1929. Loan Sharks is 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 custom 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.
Download or read book Religion and Finance written by Mervyn K. Lewis and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism, Christianity and Islam all impose obligations and constraints upon the rightful use of wealth and earthly resources. All three of these religions have well-researched views on the acceptability of practices such as usury but the principles and practices of other, non-interest, financial instruments are less well known. This book examines each of these three major world faiths, considering their teachings, social precepts and economic frameworks, which are set out as a guide for the financial dealings and economic behaviour of their adherents.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Debt written by Alexander X. Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I owe you a dinner invitation, you owe ten years on your mortgage, and the government owes billions. We speak confidently about these cases of debt, but is that concept clear in its meaning? This book aims to clarify the concept of debt so we can find better answers to important moral and political questions. This book seeks to accomplish two things. The first is to clarify the concept of debt by examining how the word is used in language. The second is to develop a general, principled account of how debts generate genuine obligations. This allows us to avoid settling each case by a bare appeal to moral intuitions, which is what we seem to currently do. It requires a close examination of many institutions, e.g. money, contract law, profit-driven finance, government fiscal operations, and central banking. To properly understand the moral and political nature of debt, we must understand how these institutions have worked, how they do work, and how they might be made to work. There have been many excellent anthropological and sociological studies of debt and its related institutions. Philosophy can contribute to the emerging discussion and help us to keep our language precise and to identify the implicit principles contained in our intuitions.
Download or read book Medici Money written by Tim Parks and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed. To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.
Download or read book Islamic Banking and Interest written by Abdullah Saeed and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1996 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical study of the interpretation of "riba" in Islam, the attempts of Islamic banks to put the interpretation into practice, the problems associated with these attempts and an argument for rethinking the interpretation.
Download or read book Interest Usury Riba and the Operational Costs of a Bank written by A. L. M. Abdul Gafoor and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Growth of Economic Thought written by Henry William Spiegel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new and updated edition of this classic textbook, Henry William Spiegel brings his discussion and analysis of economic thought into the 1990s. A new introductory chapter offering an overall view of the history of economics and a bibliographic survey of the economic literature of the 1980s and early 1990s have been added. Maintaining the link between economics and the humanities, Spiegel's text will continue to introduce students to a wide range of topics in the history of economic thought. From reviews of previous editions: "The history of economic thought to end all histories of economic thought."--Robert D. Patton, Journal of Economic Literature "The book is in the grand tradition of the history of doctrines. It is a history of economic thought broadly conceived--and superbly written to boot. It is not to much to say that Spiegel's book will become and remain a leading text in the field."--Warren J. Samuels, Social Science The author conveys the essence of an idea simply and clearly, yet in a graceful style."--William F. Kennedy, Journal of Economic Literature
Download or read book The idea of usury from tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood written by Benjamin Nelson and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Defence of Usury written by Jeremy Bentham and published by . This book was released on 1788 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reforming the Morality of Usury written by David W. Jones and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2004 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Church experienced a dramatic shift in its moral perception of the practice of usury. Leaders of the continental Protestant Reformation (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist) all grappled with the Roman Catholic Church's moral teaching on the practice of lending money at interest. Although these three theological streams addressed the same moral problem, at relatively the same time, they each responded differently. Reforming the Morality of Usury examines how the leaders of each major stream in the continental Protestant Reformation adopted a different approach to reforming moral teaching on the practice of usury.
