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This chapter explains the success of companies such as Provident Financial and Cattles (both members of the FTSE 250 by the 1990s). Their agents serviced the growing sub-prime sector and commercialized backstreet feminized affectual relationships between borrowers and lenders. The extent to which their success was dependent on the decline of pawnbroking and mail order agency (and the limitations of the government's Social Fund) is explained. The motivations and limited options of moneylenders' customers are explored as are accusations of ‘predatory lending’ and exploitation. Moneylenders fought PR battles to exclude themselves from the label ‘loan shark’, as images of criminal moneylenders increasingly replaced ones of ‘Shylocks’. The chapter examines the role of violent loan sharks, explaining their small but significant market. Particularly important was the fact that government resisted calls for interest rate caps because it feared legal lenders would abandon their riskiest borrowers, leaving them vulnerable to loan sharks.

This chapter details the evolution of Chinese informal finance, describing the different types of informal finance that have eased constraints posed by the formal financial sector. It discusses why informal finance is important and how it has evolved, as well as what can be further done to improve informal finance. Informal finance has been rejuvenated since the reform and opening-up policy of the 1980s, as China has experienced the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, as well as the transition from single-ownership to multi-ownership and a rapid boom of the private economy. Because of the critical role of informal finance in the economy, the government should regard informal finance as a “weathervane” that can forecast the credit demand of the financial market; as an innovation, which can optimize the allocation of institutional resources; and as an induced institutional arrangement, which can fix up the problems brought about by state-oriented financing and institutional change.

This chapter focuses on pawnshops and the institutions of pawnbroking. Studies show that large numbers of poor people and especially those who are unbanked use pawn loans by leaving collateral. This institution has existed for centuries and while attention has shifted away from it, the informal pawn broker remains a source of survival for the very poor. And this is not unconnected to what happens in the larger, formal economy. After the global financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007–2008, quickly engulfed the world, and became the protracted Great Recession, the pawnbroking industry in the United States and Sweden grew by an astonishing 20 percent per year, as poor people were forced to turn to informal credit for their survival. Despite this industry's importance, pawnbroking has characteristically received little attention and also little regulation. The chapter then raises a host of questions regarding the welfare consequences of these informal lending markets in rich countries and how they could be regulated.

This chapter explores an analysis of pawnbroking, which requires parsing simultaneously three areas of Jewish law: debt, pawns, and usury. Any analysis must also incorporate the practices of moneylending in medieval France and Germany and equally the laws governing pawnbroking in these countries. Pawnbroking generated problems. An item might be pawned by a prince, an abbot, a wealthy burgher, a peasant, or even a passing stranger, for people of every rank are occasionally confronted with an urgent need for cash. However, one should emphasize that making loans that are secured by a pawned item and pawnbroking are two different businesses. The chapter then discusses pawnbroking in Ashkenazic halakhic thought, examining ribbit (interest or usury). It also highlights the revolutionary role of Rashi in both halakhic theory and practice. Rashi and his grandson, Rabbenu Tam, dominate the landscape of pawnbroking and usury.

This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage their assets when fleeing to “Lombardy,” that is, to northern and central Italy. From there, Italian refugees exported the newly invented financial instruments north of the Alps, where bankers and moneylenders were called “Lombards,” a name eventually given to a public square in Amsterdam. Cleirac's merging of these spaces has the effect of tracing a direct line between fourteenth-century Lombards and seventeenth-century Amsterdam and makes pawnbroking appear contiguous with the most sophisticated forms of financial credit developed during the sixteenth century. This chronological compression is crucial to Cleirac's rhetorical strategy of making medieval Jewish moneylenders, the object of scorn and prejudice, interchangeable with the international merchant-bankers of the seventeenth century.

This chapter uses as its main source the Annuity Tax Roll for Edinburgh, which lists every landlord, tenant, and property in Edinburgh in 1635. It considers the presence of women in the tax roll both as landladies and tenants, and therefore explores economic issues such as women's control of property, and social issues such as spinster-clustering. It also uses debt litigation to explore the issue of landlord-tenant relationships, not just in Edinburgh, but also in Haddington, Linlithgow, and Dundee. From there, the chapter examines the control of monetary property, through the practice of moneylending, which also had a clear status element, and the control of small property, through cases of pawnbroking.