I love the fact about them being coops and having the ability to borrow with their cheese as collateral. It is so old world and so wholesome. I'd like to borrow against my cheese one day.
If the farmer has a shit year, the lender has a variety of options for recourse. Including dispossessing the farmer of land. Historically there were other options like selling one's family. You could castrate yourself and hope to God you'll be accepted into court. Debtor's prison I imagine is also a probable consequence. This is doubly offensive when we consider interest, which can often result in multiples of the initial investment, and that many large scale first world lenders have developed world and the IMF backing them basically indicating they're not allowed default.
Hard to say with the information provided, but it seems typical of the trend.
The beauty of the current system is that because everyone has been told they are free, it is their own fault when they get trapped in a debt cycle.
Thus their own moral sense is the jailor.
Much of modern transactional banking and securities law became settled during that period, eventually becoming nearly universal across disparate legal regimes around the world.
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/how-the-medici-family-...
It describes changes that happened in war, mining, shipping, trade in (mostly western) Europe in the last decades of XV century. The common theme is finance and it includes a chapter on how bank houses became bigger and could secure much bigger loans (which allowed bigger states to wage wars, or rich individuals to bid for top titles ;)).
Fun read.
One learns every day :) I will be more careful about this when writing centuries in English the next time.
Also this poster on quora have a detailed list https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-write-century-numbers-with-I...
When someone borrows against cheese they are borrowing against existing personal property for which labor has already been supplied rather than borrowing against future earnings. The lender does not need to verify income and credit, just inspect the purity of the cheese. With a home loan, the owner is borrowing against the personal property in the building, as well as the common property in the land and the future earnings of other people such as their tenants.
Additionally in the case of a co-op, the interest charges the organization collects on the debt are usually reinvested locally for the benefit members.
Most of the stuff in my living room, for example, would not be able to secure a loan, except maybe a pawn loan on undesirable terms.
And it’s really weird to look at credit cards as an example of the same thing. “Your ability to earn and repay” is not generally classified as an “asset” except maybe metaphorically — not a financial/accounting sense.