About interest..................

 

     "The emergency of interest to incentivize lending is the most significant of all innovations in the history of finance," writes the financial historian William Goetzmann.  This point is well made.  Finance allows people to transact across time.  The farmer borrows barley to sow his fields but must wait until harvest before repaying the debt.  Industrial processes—even the light crafts-based industries of the Ancie4nt Near East—require time in production from raw materials to the sale of finished goods.  A text from third-millennium Mesopotamia shows that the preparation of cloth took over a year.  Foreign trade consumes a lot of time.  When capital is tied up in industry or trade, the interest charge bears some connection to the time used in production.

     In any society with private property, whether in Mesopotamia or later civilizations, the payment of interest is required to induce people to lend their resources.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest