Laws designed to prevent usury, or the taking of "excessive" interest, have long been the subject of controversy. While advocates of usury ceilings claim that such controls protect consumers from abusive lending practices and enable them to obtain loans at reasonable rates, their critics argue that they work to consumers' disadvantage by restricting credit flows and distorting financial markets. In economic theory, the credit market is viewed like any other market. There are buyers (borrowers) and sellers (lenders) of credit; the price of credit is the interest rate. The credit market is easily represented in a conventional supply and demand diagram like the one shown below. As.
