Loan Sharks: The Birth of Predatory Lending

Predatory lending: A problem rooted in the past that continues today.

Looking for an investment return that could exceed 500 percent annually; maybe even twice that much?

Private, unregulated lending to high-risk borrowers is the answer, or at least it was in the United States for much of the period from the Civil War to the onset of the early decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers called the practice “loan sharking” because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators ...