the.com/loan shark
A lender who treats your desperation as collateral and your kneecaps as a backup plan.
means A person who lends money at extortionate, often illegal interest rates and enforces repayment through threats or intimidation rather than courts.
from An American coinage from around the turn of the 20th century, pairing 'loan' with 'shark' — already slang for a predatory swindler long before this, drawing on the fish's reputation as a ruthless, circling predator that strikes the weak and desperate. The phrase caught on alongside the rise of small, unregulated 'salary lenders' preying on poor workers, and by the early 1900s 'loan shark' was common enough to appear in reform campaigns and early usury laws aimed at shutting them down.
- interest rates
- can exceed 1000 percent annually, legally impossible elsewhere
- origin
- term coined in 1900s america, not from actual fishing
- collection method
- intimidation replaces credit checks and paperwork
- legal cousin
- payday loans do the same math, politely