ABSTRACT
Interest is desire, appetite, greed, lust, love, devotion, attraction, repulsion, curiosity, egoism, altruism, readiness, awakeness; it is need, necessity, embarras de richesse, too little, too much; it is the opposite of indifference: it is difference. Interest is essentially the same thing as energy. No interest is possible where there is no difference, in exactly the same way as no energy can produce itself without a difference. In the domain of economic activity the notion of interest has crystallized into a specific form. Interest is expressed in terms of a traction, five-hundredths being the medium value. There are times when interest assumes impossible dimensions. It becomes impossible to pay the price of money when the rate of interest goes down. The rate of interest will exceed its natural bounds when the pulse of economic life, which is the circulation of money, is too quick.
