Usury

In Western economies, the charging of interest for loans is just something that is rarely questioned. It is deemed necessary, in order to generate income and to offset the risk that loans might not be repaid (Benfield, 1968). Modern Western legal prohibitions against usury, such as they are, centre on the notion of preventing financial service organisations from charging excessive interest (Lewison, 1999), which is certainly how modern dictionaries define it (Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2017). However, this was, and is, not always the case.