A loan shark is a person or body that offers loans at extremely high interest rates. The term usually refers to illegal activity, but may also refer to predatory lending with extremely high interest rates such as payday or title loans. Loan sharks sometimes enforce repayment by blackmail or threats of violence. Historically, many moneylenders skirted between legal and extra-legal activity. In the recent western world, loan sharks have been a feature of the criminal underworld.
Read more about Loan Shark: UK Loan Sharks, Non-standard Lenders in The United States, Yamikinyu in Japan, Ah Long in Malaysia and Singapore
Famous quotes containing the words loan and/or shark:
“Slight was the thing I bought,
Small was the debt I thought,
Poor was the loan at best—
God! but the interest!”
—Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
“I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)