Institutional Usury

This paper considers what contemporary financial ethics might learn for from more than 2000 years of Christian experience with usury. In the Hebrew Scriptures the law codes prohibit the charging of interest, and this is reinforced in the prophetic and wisdom books. In several Gospel texts Jesus deals tangentially with the issue. Usury was strongly condemned by the Church Fathers and came to be regulated by both canon law and civil law. In recent times the charging of interest has become normalised, with churches now largely silent on the issue. Pastoral discipline of users is rare. I understand the Scriptural texts as condemning financial exploitation of the vulnerable and explore what this might mean in the context of contemporary financial systems, with the aid of the concept of institutional usury developed by the Jesuit economist Bernard Dempsey. I consider several examples of institutional usury: banks extracting usury through credit creation, governments extracting usury from their citizens when they print money to cover budget deficits, and universities who debauch the quality of degrees extracting usury from their students through government-facilitated loans.