Campaign to Ban Usury

Well, not exactly, but some joker did let Ann Pettifor have column inches on Saturday to demand that usury be re-classified as a sin.

“Let us make no bones about it. This financial crisis is a major spiritual crisis. It is the crisis of a society that worships at the temples of consumption, and that has isolated and often abandoned millions of consumers now trapped on a treadmill of debt. It is the crisis of a society that values the capital gains of the rentier more highly than the rights of people to a home, or an education or health. It is the crisis of a society that idolises money above love, community, wellbeing and the sustainability of our planet. And it is a crisis, in my view, for faith organisations that have effectively colluded in this idolatry, by tolerating the sin of usury.”

Usury, if you weren’t aware, simply means charging interest on a loan – or sometimes, in its pejorative sense, charging excessive interest on a loan. But wait up, wasn’t this current crisis the result of low interest rates and frothy lending practices? Not to worry, we can just reclassify the concept and explode it to mean anything that has anything to do with money AT ALL:

“I define usury as the exalting of money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rates of interest intended to accumulate reserves of unearned income. Of reaping that which one did not sow.”

I define usury as the fundamentally necessary financial instrument by which people buy houses, start businesses, send their kids to school, manage their finances, pay their employees, run any kind of economy beyond some down-in-the-mud medieval convent which it would seem is the brave new world Pettifor is advocating.

I know there’s a financial crisis going on, and everyone is a little stressed, but come on…

Posted by Jonty Rhodes in Hot Money | October 12, 2008 8:22PM |