Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

Depending on the way things are structured, the bank might also be the insurer. It's not going to affect the total payments, it's just going to affect what gets written on the invoices.
That's because Muslims have a strong incentive to pretend otherwise. Like most legal fictions, anyone actually involved in the fiction pretends it doesn't exist.

In the end, the big reason for being skeptical about Islamic banking is that they can't repeal economics. Many societies have had prohibitions on usury, and none of them have actually worked except in edge cases (for example, elimination of debt slavery).

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

The original technical meaning of "usury" was simply "lending money at interest." The rate of interest didn't matter.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

No one who is lending money for commercial reasons, rather than within a family, to a friend, or as an act of charity, would accept getting the same money back a year later. "I'll pay you now" is not equivalent to "I'll pay you a year from now" in value—nor to "I'll pay you now, but you have to agree not to spend the money till a year from now." The latter gives you fewer options, and the ones you don't get include the most urgent ones.

So if you do prohibit lending X amount of money and getting back X+x, one of three things will happen: Either you get workarounds, or you have desperate borrowers going to black market lenders (who will charge higher interest rates and/or use brutal enforcement methods), or you simply have no ability to borrow money, no matter how desperate your need. In GURPS terms, the first two rely primarily on Law and Streetwise, respectively. (Whereas if interest is legal, you just need to make a Finance roll.)

One of the common workarounds, though, is the understanding that you are lending money to a productive enterprise—in effect, sharecropping. Your funds pay for assets that increase the output, and thus you're entitled to share in the output you've helped produce. That doesn't do anything for consumer loans, including purchase of consumer durables such as cars, houses, or yachts, but it would seem to apply, at least potentially, to spaceships.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

In effect, venture capital -- rather than making a loan, you buy shares, possibly with an agreement that they can be bought back later. That's actually a more likely model for spaceship financing than a bank loan anyway, at least for PCs.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

The ancient Athenians had a legal distinction between "land loans" and "sea loans." The former charged interest by the interval of time. The latter did not; they assigned a fixed amount of interest for the duration of a voyage. This might be something that lenders would consider for spaceships, if there were a loan market.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

As a side note, the OP specified that it's similar to Islamic banking, not that it is Islamic banking. As such, the question is what definition the fictional culture uses.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

Yes, that's why I wasn't talking about the actual Muslim rules, but about what the options are.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

Another point: both finances and financial regulation are essentially technologies. Financial regulation can be optimized to favor certain ends, and there is no reason to think that the technology is at its maximum potential; a TL 9 setting presumably has TL 9 finances and financial regulation.

Unfortunately, none of us are TL 9 economists, so we have no real way of describing what TL 9 finance would look like. The financial system in Spaceships is roughly TL 6, and the prohibitions built into Islamic banking are TL 3-4.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

If the ship is essentially "rented" then there would be a very different legal situation if a third party sought to impound the ship for other reasons.


A technological solution might develop, presuming a company was established for the purposes of funding a ship and cargo. Then an A.I. is placed in the ship with a decision making process based on the precise ownership of the ship at that time.

Re: [Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases
 

As best as I understand it it would work by making the bank an actual silent partner. They jointly purchase the ship with their client, and as co-owner are entitled to a slice of the proceeds from the ship's operation. This is technically not interest and continues until their partners manage to earn enough to buy them out which won't necessarily be for the same price as the original money the bank put up for the purchase.