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In Spain the Catholic Church created a series of banks for lending to poor people, and investing profit in social causes. I think the concept came from Italy.
by hevi_jos 8y ago
In Spain the Catholic Church created a series of banks for lending to poor people, and investing profit in social causes. I think the concept came from Italy.
Those banks were called "Cajas de ahorros". Most people had their money there instead of private Banks.
The concept worked very well for something like 200 years. Until politicians changed the law to control the Cajas themselves.
After politicians took control,they did things like private lending at 0 interest to their friends and party(they even lent to one of the biggest party 50 Million euro and then totally forgave the debt!!) or putting their almost illiterate friends as counselors.
It took only 15 years after that to totally bankrupt all cajas in Spain, and now they are owned by private banks.
- pvaldes 8y ago> totally bankrupt all cajas in Spain and now they are owned by Some cajas, not all. The broken cajas typically 'bribed/rewarded' policitians offering them vacancies in their boards of directors.
- lottin 8y agoThe Catholic Church has always tended to see charging interest as being equivalent to committing the sin of usury and throughout history they've tried to ban it several times. See for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit#Historical_context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit#Historical_contex... In practice these prohibitions weren't too effective because people always found loopholes and ways of charging interest without calling it interest.