True To Our Heritage ?

King (Street) of Beasts...

The Sages of Alexandria have just closed out the indulgence period, during which their credit union serfs stakeholders were allowed to comment on payday advance loans i.e., "PALs" ( pretty cute, heh!).  The question of particular import was whether or not credit union serfs members should be dinged with rates and fees on PALs even higher than the 36% currently permitted.  With the economy so strong and savings rates rising so rapidly, this inquiry clearly makes good sense.

One commenter on the regulatory proposal was Roy F. Bergengren who, with Edward Filene, helped create the credit union movement in the U.S.  Here's what he had to say:

"It is recorded, in Grote's History of Greece, how the yeoman, the small landowner, lost his freedom.  He had no normal credit facilities and lost his lands to the usurers. Usury is nurtured in human greed. It grows like a poisonous weed, ensnarling its victims and reducing them to economic bondage.  In ancient Rome, it was the moneylenders who made serfs of freemen.  Usury has existed all through the centuries because of the false assumption that the average man (and woman) was not entitled to normal money credit.

The denial of normal credit persisted through the years until, at last, strong men (and women) came, of great vision, who labored until they found a solution.  They did not find it in a source of credit created by the rich for the poor.  No - they found it in the hitherto unsuspected capacity of the people to work together, to pool their savings, however small, and thereby to create normal credit for themselves without usury.

They made revolutionary discoveries.  They discovered that the average man (and woman) was honest and deserving of normal credit.  On the basis of these discoveries they organized people in groups and taught them the high privilege of self-reliance.  The groups became a new, an established force, universal in possible application because the lack of normal credit facilities for the masses of the people was a worldwide problem.  The groups brought economic improvement to millions of people, increasing their individual wealth, teaching them the true power of credit, creating within them the consciousness of their latent capacity to manage their own money.

They resolved to carry the battle against usury to every nook and corner of the world until, at long last, there shall be no slavery to usurious money lenders, any place on earth."

THEY CALLED THIS REMARKABLE DISCOVERY A CREDIT UNION.

... a regulator pushing the need for usury within credit unions ?

Thereby "reducing the serfs members to economic bondage "?

REGULATORY REFORM IS MANDATORY WHEN ONE HAS LOST BOTH THE WISDOM OF THE PAST AND THE VISION OF THE FUTURE...