[Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

As mentioned before, the former sounds like something closer to joint investment with asymmetric rights rather than usury. The implications of different ownership rights are the most interesting for me at this point, as well as the removal of compound penalties for late payments (I actually have difficulty understanding what are they replaced with to compensate for the risk of the client being late with the profits).

For rental arrangements + piecemeal purchases, it seems like rental cost should normally vary depending on the fraction of the ship owned by the bank and the captain/buyer; wonder what other adjustments are necessary.

I don't yet have solid information on this.

As far as I can tell from anecdote, the Islamic lender is more willing to take back the primary asset than the Western, who may let penalty fees build up instead – which is obviously easier with a house than with a spaceship, but there have been threads here about spaceship repo men.

I would expect that the rate paid for fractional ownership would vary just as interest rates do, based on the likely profitability and risks of the enterprise.

Again from anecdote, so this may not be universal, the "rental" fiction is accepted as such: if you have an Islamic not-mortgage for your house, you still get to modify it as you see fit (in the UK renters generally don't get to do this without the landlord's permission).

Using the "company finance" model, the level of control varies - the Islamic bank may be hands-off and just take its percentage, or it may want to be a partner in the venture, even to the extent of having a representative permanently involved in running it. As far as I can tell this varies with different Islamic subcultures.