“Usury,” a word that has come to mean exorbitant or predatory interest rates, originally referred to the practice of charging any interest at all. The medieval Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas believed it was wrong to make money from the lending of money, that doing so went against “moral and natural law” and led to inequality. And in Inferno, the Italian poet Dante put usurers on the lowest ledge of the seventh circle of hell—lower even than murderers.
The bedrock of consumer capitalism...
