Fees charged for the loan service
If the entire process of giving and taking loans is considered as some kind of a business, then it can be realized that the process of giving loans is actually a kind of service done by the lender for the borrower and thus effectively becomes eligible for a fee in exchange of this particular service rendered. Throughout the ages of history, loans being an old practice among human civilizations, this fee which is popularly known as usury, has taken various forms in the different nooks and corners of the world, the most common being the interest which is charged on the principal amount and is calculated at a fixed rate over the time period of repayment.
However, it should be noted that curiously enough, during the modern age when these various steps involved in charging the interest became legalized and the rates and limits were standardized by a governing body, the meaning of the word usury ceased to remain what it was and instead became associated with the offensive activity of abusing the laws by charging unreasonably high rates of interests for a loan. In most of the countries today there are very strict laws against such activities which violate the laws regarding the process of giving and taking loans. For instance in the United States, each of the individual state has their own separate decrees on this matter and all of them very clearly limit the rate of interest for a loan and what is threshold point beyond which any rate would be regarded as offensive, unlawful and a case of usury. In fact, if a lender party is found to be guilty of committing usury, then the lender is not given the permission to file a case against the borrower in case of a failure of repayment.