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Borrowed £19.5k for 26 years, paid back £208k - equivalent to ~9% interest. Doesn’t seem too bad…
Bearing in mind that gain was from completely unearned asset appreciation.Edit:
I just scrolled down a bit - the lender ‘typically’ taking 75% of appreciation is wild. -
Why shouldn't a lender make a fair return?
Not to get all woo woo about it, but that's been a fairly big moral question in various societies throughout history, and any interest whatsoever has been outlawed quite a few times.
If you have a look at the wiki pages on usury and riba, it's quite a fun rabbit hole if you're into that sort of thing. It gives a nice but weird philosophical background to why a state might be seen as a preferred provider of finance.
In many historical societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies, usury meant the charging of interest of any kind, and was considered wrong, or was made illegal. During the Sutra period in India (7th to 2nd centuries BC) there were laws prohibiting the highest castes from practicing usury. Similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism (ribbit in Hebrew), Christianity, and Islam (riba in Arabic). At times, many states from ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawed loans with any interest. Though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, as well as the Reformed Churches, regarded the charging of interest at any rate as sinful (as well as charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change).
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riba
#Csb but I was once involved in redesigning an existing investment structure to be sharia compliant, so I can't help but be pretty dismissive of the whole concept. I'm sure there is legitimate stuff out there but my limited experience was it's was at best gate-keeping, at worst a grift.
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But are we looking at fully regulated mortgage market or payday lender style systems?
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Was a while back, but from memory basically involved ctrl+F'ing bond terms to replace with "profit share" and paying a South African Imam to write us a certificate. I mean obviously there was a bit more work to out how to equate the bond coupon over whatever the term was to the profit share.
Me and the designer spent loads of effort on the investment document trying to bring in non-cheesy underlying themes of Islam and sharia investment into the text and images. The main intermery basically wanted less boring info more big glossy pictures, so that was pointless. Although it made the excerses more interesting for me.
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Nice to see this kind of analysis in the Guardian. The centre now appears to be realising that Labour’s orthodox position is becoming a problem:
In their own way, Reeves and Starmer are as stereotypically Labour as their more left-leaning colleagues, but they are statist technocrats rather than merchants of social change: their shared quest, it seems, is to put the government machine back in working order and cling on to its orthodoxies in the hope that they can be restored, while somehow sparking renewed economic growth.
This is really a bureaucrat’s prospectus, all about such apolitical concepts as competence and efficiency.
And its most vivid illustration is the three-pronged insistence that will define the immediate political future: that supposed fiscal rectitude must prevail, that no really ambitious thinking can be brought to the tax system and, as a consequence, that meaningfully lifting the country out of the hole it has been stuck in for 14 years is going to have to wait. Treasury spreadsheets, it seems, have decided our fate – and the national malaise may be about to deepen even further.
I disagree with his framing of ‘efficiency as an apolitical concept’, but you can’t have everything I suppose
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Those press pack images of the huddle on a flight. Are they done to look presidential or for the benefit of the reporters who will get them framed or whatever? Never got it or who initiates it.
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Pilot V5, the dependable and affordable solution you'd expect from someone ready to roll up thier shirt sleeves and do the hard graft
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Yes, and the example given is of where a very unfair return was made and vulnerable customers were left in pitiable positions. Where there is a non-state provider, of course there will be a profit element, it's a case of how the risk between provider/customer is balanced/managed to avoid outcomes like in the above.