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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 2108825" data-attributes="member: 8447">Part of the earlier injunction against charging interest in the Middle Ages came from the notion that the merchant (or banker or lender or whathaveyou) was essentially charging someone else for time.  As said merchant had not created time (only God created time), then how could he possibly charge for it?  Wouldn't it be immoral to charge for something you did not create?One way around this was the old "cartload of goods" approach.  A loan deal would be struck and the person taking out the loan would "loan" a ficticious wagon filled with merchadize to the lender.  At the end of the loan period, the person taking the loan would buy this ficticious cart back, thus providing the lender with his interest.It should also be noted that storing your coins with an early bank did not earn you interest -- indeed, you paid the bank to watch your coinage, so essentially your coin horde decreased each month (or quarter or year).  A lot of early proto-banking was in place by the time of the great trade fairs of the 12th and 13th century.  Merchants would sell letters of credit back and forth, therefor not being required to actually bring cash with them or equivalent good.  The next time a merchant with this letter of credit was near the house of the issuing family, the letter could be exchanged for cash (assuming they actually had it on hand -- speculation was rampant and therefore sometimes cash was in short supply).  Letters of credit could also be exchanged to third parties, usually at a discount.  And of course with little in the way of truly standardized coinage, many provisions were made to make exchanges at the most favourable rate possible (i.e. a soldus [silver coin] from one town might be significantly lighter than a soldus from another).  Ah yes, medival economics -- now even MORE confusing!   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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