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Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

economist.com

161–163 of 163 posts

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#161

I had the opportunity to translate technical documents for both conventional and sharia financial products a few years ago, and I find the market fascination of them mind-boggling. These products seemed to incorporate convoluted jargon and concepts which dramatically increased complexity but at the same time, produced no extra utility for end-users. On top of that, the addition of ongoing shariah-compliance introduce…

This is my take: Interest is just another term for the time value of money. The time value of money is a fact of life as long as there are opportunities in the world to invest in something that is productive. Therein lies the problem: you can't explicitly charge interest, but you are still subject to the time value of money. The only option is to describe/disguise the time value of money in terms that don't bring up…

Interest also pays for the risk of not getting your money back.

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping people from doing that?

I imagine that would be because it takes land prices and shoots them through the floor. This is rather unpopular among people who own land, which in the US is a large portion of the population.

Also if you do that the prices of houses go down so if people can’t pay their mortgage and the house is foreclosed on the bank doesn’t get their money, which can easily go out of control and cause a crisis.

Re: Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance

#163
post #21

Very interesting--I had never heard of this before. It seems the higher interest rate is predicated on finding investors who want to take loans at higher-than-market-clearing rates. Does anyone have any insight into why non-Muslims are getting loans through these banks? I don't see how this scales to consistently provide higher returns, especially as more money moves into this system. Are tobacco and alcohol related…

Maybe some non-Muslims don't want their money to go into arms, alcohol and tobacco? The Economist also forgot to mention gambling too. Edit: there -> their

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