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• n  an exorbitant or unlawful rate of interest
• n  the act of lending money at an exorbitant rate of interest

• For years, I've hyperventilated at restaurant "tasting menu" checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury .
• Researchers believe the Templars kept any revenues generated by the estates, effectively accruing interest a practice otherwise forbidden as usury by the Church at the time.
• Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one.

• vigorish

News & Articles

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• Letter: A Recipe for Personal Crisis
  It greatly disturbed me to read in the July 14 Sunday Valley News that a car title loan operation is opening in West Lebanon. As a United Church of Christ pastor, I am well aware of the many Bible verses decrying “usury,” and that’s what high-interest car title lending is.
  July 21, 2013 - Valley News

Quotes

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• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in eTaiwan News
  Usury, which is entrenched in the capitalist system, is perhaps the main reason why the system has gone bankrupt,Ahmadinejad said. "It is a way of accumulating capital without working. Usury, according to the Koran, is fighting with...
• Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Daily Times
  The collapse of capitalism based on usury and paper and not on the trading of goods on the market is proof that it is in crisis and shows the Islamic economic philosophy is holding up,prominent Egyptian-born Qatar-based cleric Sheikh Yussef...
• Osama bin Laden in Bloomberg
  The hardest legacy is to inherit a long guerilla war against a patient, stubborn adversary, a war funded by usury loans,bin Laden says in the tape.