Usury

Norman Jones

Economic History
Welfare Economics: Allocative Efficiency, Externalities, Fairness, Altruism
Financial Economics
Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

Article

The question of when and if money can be lent at interest for a guaranteed return is one of the oldest moral and economic problems in Western Civilization. This article describes how by the early modern period the concept of usury began to be secularized, but the issue of what usury is and when it occurs is still causing disputes in modern legal and theological systems.