Age of Invention: Capital and the King Killers

In this update for the newsletter’s supporters, I’d like to share a few things I’m still investigating.

Following last week’s post on how the Dutch managed to lower their interest rates by making capital as abundant as possible, I’ve been doing some more digging into the context of the brute-force English policy of simply making it illegal to lend over a certain rate. In particular, I’ve been trying to find out more about the lowering of the maximum from 8% to 6% in 1651 — an action taken by the remaining and most radical MPs of the Rump Parliament, which had beheaded King Charles I.