Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, 50 percent, or even in some cases (for instance, for payday loans) up to 6,000 percent annually, the sort of numbers that would once have made the mafia blush, perfectly legal—and therefore, enforceable no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims’ doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police.29 Any number of names have been coined to describe the new dispensation, from the “democratization of finance” to the “financialization of everyday life.”30 Outside the United States, it came to be known as “neoliberalism.”