Nominalism
Categories: Marketing
If the lending world wasn’t nominalist, then lenders would be charging you interest…for inflation, that is. Nominalism is the principle that debts are based on nominal monetary units, i.e. not adjusted for inflation.
If you borrow $10k from a bank today, and then the economy breaks into hyperinflation, that’s good news for you and bad news for the bank. All of a sudden, money is worth more as toilet paper, since the number of bills you’d have to pay to buy toilet paper would result in more surface area than the paper itself. Bread used to be a few bucks, now it’s thousands. Which means that what you owe, the $10k, is now almost nothing…no more than a few loaves of bread.
Lenders deal with the inflationary erosion of real value all the time. When you pay them back “in the future” in relation to when you borrowed the money, your repayments are worth less now than back then, because of inflation. Lucky for them, inflation these days is pretty stable and low, so it’s not so bad. For now.