scholarly journals Retrospectives: From Usury To Interest

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Persky

Since the Middle Ages, each epoch has participated in the debate over the conditions in which lending should be prohibited as usury. While disagreements over the definition of usury remain, the debate came to its modern climax on the eve of the industrial revolution, in a well-known interchange between Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith in the late 1780s. Smith, for all his faith in a system of natural liberty, proved unwilling to let the interest rate float. Bentham argued anything else must reduce total welfare. From a superficial perspective, the entire affair amounts to nothing more than a modest dispute between a failing master (Smith died in 1790) and an over-eager disciple. (Bentham acknowledged in the Defence that all he knew of political economy originated in Smith's works.) Yet the argument struck a fundamental chord. Gilbert K. Chesterton identified Bentham's essay on usury as the very beginning of the “modern world.” I tend to agree.

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 966-979
Author(s):  
Cleomar Gomes da Silva ◽  
Rafael Cavalcanti de Araújo

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conduct of monetary policy in Brazil and estimate the country’s neutral real interest rate. Design/methodology/approach The authors make use of a state-space macroeconomic model representation. Findings The period of analysis goes from 2003 up to the end of 2013 and the results show that the country’s natural rate of interest was around 4.2 percent in December 2013. Originality/value One of the main differences of this work is the inclusion of variables such as the real exchange rate and world interest rate. This is important because these variables play an important role in the definition of the interest rate and, consequently, in the definition of the neutral interest rate.


Author(s):  
Zielinska Teresa

The short history of service robots with its precursors is given. Next, the definition of service robot is discussed and some statistical data is given. The described history of service robots covers the ancient period with robot precursors, the middle ages, and the period of industrial revolution. The representative examples of different kinds of service robots built in the twentieth century are given. The chapter is concluded with future trends.


VUZF Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
Anna Małgorzata Jatczak

Mathematical modeling is the description of the reality in the language of the mathematics and formal logic which creates symbols, mathematical relation and also strictly determined rules of employing them (Jaworski, Micał 2005). This article is devoted to the structure of the model describing the process of increasing the capital value within the time which basis constitutes the calculations based on the rule of simple percentage. In its content are determined the chosen, basic terms associated with the financial activity of the bank (including interest rate, interest, discount). Mathematical models are also discussed enabling to count: the final capital for the initial capital with the fixed annual interest rate for the set time, the initial capital which generated the determined final capital with the fixed annual interest rate for the set time, the interest rate on the basis of the initial and final capital after certain time, the initial value of the loan for the amount of the payoff within the fixed discount rate within the certain time, the value of the commercial discount for one year on the basis of the initial value of the loan and the amount of its payoff. The presented content will supply the reader with the knowledge in calculations applied in the banks associated with the simple percentage. The article constitutes the example of combination of the theoretical knowledge with the practice and it also shows how important mathematical modeling is in the modern world.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith

This chapter examines Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution, which came to England and southern Scotland in the last third of the eighteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, the workers who previously had been producing goods in their cottages or food and wool on their farms moved to the factories and the factory towns. Merchants began to invest their capital in factories and machinery or in the far from munificent wages that kept alive the workers. This change was made possible by the industrialist, whose orientation was to the production of goods, rather than their purchase or sale. The chapter discusses Smith's views on a variety of subjects, which he articulated in the Wealth of Nations, including borrowing, capitalism, free trade, competition, credit, distribution, innovation, justice, labor, manufacturing, merchants, monopolies, political economy, prices, production and productivity, profit, public policy, rent, standard of living, and value.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gordon

The quest of human for better production and management methods to generate or to raise income is asancient as time. Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), David Ricardo (1772 – 1823), and Jeremy Bentham (1748 –1832) are considered to be the pioneers of modern management theories. The conventional managementtheories originated in the industrial revolution when technical advances, the expansion of commerce andmarkets, increasing populations generate mass production opportunities by means of a motorized andsystemic method. First, this research reviews three most crucial early works: An Inquiry into the Natureand Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776) by Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), “Letter to T. R. Malthus,October 9, 1820” by David Ricardo (1772 – 1823), and “Introduction to the Principles of Morals” (1789)by Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832). Second, we compare those early works with modern theories andpractices of HRM. We argued that the early theories were built upon materialistic consideration; while,the modern theories are established on both materialistic and humanitarian grounds. The trends in HRMliterature showed that we might witness, in coming decades, a surge of theories built on humanitarianprinciples.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Peter Jaeger

Summary Using the Mizar system [1], [5], we start to show, that the Call-Option, the Put-Option and the Straddle (more generally defined as in the literature) are random variables ([4], p. 15), see (Def. 1) and (Def. 2). Next we construct and prove the simple random variables ([2], p. 14) in (Def. 8). In the third section, we introduce the definition of arbitrage opportunity, see (Def. 12). Next we show, that this definition can be characterized in a different way (Lemma 1.3. in [4], p. 5), see (17). In our formalization for Lemma 1.3 we make the assumption that ϕ is a sequence of real numbers (there are only finitely many valued of interest, the values of ϕ in Rd). For the definition of almost sure with probability 1 see p. 6 in [2]. Last we introduce the risk-neutral probability (Definition 1.4, p. 6 in [4]), here see (Def. 16). We give an example in real world: Suppose you have some assets like bonds (riskless assets). Then we can fix our price for these bonds with x for today and x · (1 + r) for tomorrow, r is the interest rate. So we simply assume, that in every possible market evolution of tomorrow we have a determinated value. Then every probability measure of Ωfut1 is a risk-neutral measure, see (21). This example shows the existence of some risk-neutral measure. If you find more than one of them, you can determine – with an additional conidition to the probability measures – whether a market model is arbitrage free or not (see Theorem 1.6. in [4], p. 6.) A short graph for (21): Suppose we have a portfolio with many (in this example infinitely many) assets. For asset d we have the price π(d) for today, and the price π(d) (1 + r) for tomorrow with some interest rate r > 0. Let G be a sequence of random variables on Ωfut1, Borel sets. So you have many functions fk : {1, 2, 3, 4}→ R with G(k) = fk and fk is a random variable of Ωfut1, Borel sets. For every fk we have fk(w) = π(k)·(1+r) for w {1, 2, 3, 4}. $$\matrix{ {Today} & {Tomorrow} \cr {{\rm{only}}\,{\rm{one}}\,{\rm{scenario}}} & {\left\{ {\matrix{ {w_{21} = \left\{ {1,2} \right\}} \hfill \cr {w_{22} = \left\{ {3,4} \right\}} \hfill \cr } } \right.} \cr {{\rm{for}}\,{\rm{all}}\,d \in N\,{\rm{holds}}\,\pi \left( d \right)} & {\left\{ {\matrix{ {f_d \left( w \right) = G\left( d \right)\left( w \right) = \pi \left( d \right) \cdot \left( {1 + r} \right),} \hfill \cr {w \in w_{21} \,or\,w \in w_{22} ,} \hfill \cr {r > 0\,{\rm{is}}\,{\rm{the}}\,{\rm{interest}}\,{\rm{rate}}.} \hfill \cr } } \right.} \cr }$$ Here, every probability measure of Ωfut1 is a risk-neutral measure.


Robotics ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Zielinska Teresa

The short history of service robots with its precursors is given. Next, the definition of service robot is discussed and some statistical data is given. The described history of service robots covers the ancient period with robot precursors, the middle ages, and the period of industrial revolution. The representative examples of different kinds of service robots built in the twentieth century are given. The chapter is concluded with future trends.


2018 ◽  
pp. 118-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kleiner

The development of the system paradigm in economic science leads to the formulation of a number of important questions to the political economy as one of the basic directions of economic theory. In this article, on the basis of system introspection, three questions are considered. The first is the relevance of the class approach to the structuring of the socio-economic space; the second is the feasibility of revising the notion of property in the modern world; the third is the validity of the notion of changing formations as the sequence of “slave-owning system — feudal system — capitalist system”. It is shown that in modern society the system approach to the structuring of socio-economic space is more relevant than the class one. Today the classical notion of “property” does not reflect the diversity of production and economic relations in society and should be replaced by the notion of “system property”, which provides a significant expansion of the concepts of “subject of property” and “object of property”. The change of social formations along with the linear component has a more influential cyclic constituent and obeys the system-wide cyclic regularity that reflects the four-cycle sequence of the dominance of one of the subsystems of the macrosystem: project, object, environment and process.


2015 ◽  
pp. 20-40
Author(s):  
Vinh Nguyen Thi Thuy

The paper investigates the mechanism of monetary transmission in Vietnam through different channels - namely the interest rate channel, the exchange rate channel, the asset channel and the credit channel for the period January 1995 - October 2009. This study applies VAR analysis to evaluate the monetary transmission mechanisms to output and price level. To compare the relative importance of different channels for transmitting monetary policy, the paper estimates the impulse response functions and variance decompositions of variables. The empirical results show that the changes in money supply have a significant impact on output rather than price in the short run. The impacts of money supply on price and output are stronger through the exchange rate and credit channels, but however, are weaker through the interest rate channel. The impacts of monetary policy on output and inflation may be erroneous through the equity price channel because of the lack of an established and well-functioning stock market.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document