[Spaceships] Islamic Banking and Financing Spaceships Purchases

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Unfortunately I suspect distinguishing the "fault" of failures requires omniscience, and certainly distinguishing between things likely to succeed and fail in advance does. In any case, why should that be the responsibility of the lender? The borrower presumably should be smart enough not to borrow money for something that is going to fail too. If he couldn't tell, why would the lender necessarily know better?

We do already have an alternate technology that shifts the responsibility some, selling shares. This does protect you from the bad effects of failure to a considerable degree, involves more responsibility for the lender, and consequently it is both more difficult to obtain money this way and cedes more control to your lenders/partners.

On the topic of responsibility: the opinion whether or not it should be the responsibility of the lender will of course vary by culture. E.g. some cultures would deem a mostly-equal split of risks, while others will say that since bank-guilds hold disproportionally more power, they should also carry the brunt of responsibility. In other cases, it may be such that the homeline-like and the divergent approach coexist, with some people willing to tolerate some drawbacks in exchange to being more defended against risks, while others would take more risks in exchange for other benefits, and different bank-approaches would cater to different demands. In some ways it reminds me of the topic of insurances, both in the sense that whether to insure against some not-known-for-sure-in-advance bad event is a choice which different people and cultures make differently, and in the sense that ability to predict even the probability of different sorts of bad stuff happening is generally something that financial organizations can benefit from.

And yes, shares-like alternatives do seem like a basis on which the divergent finance can be based, and some steps on that path have been made in previous posts.