Does owning government bonds count as usury

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Background: I turned 18 recently and decided to open an investment account for when I intend to buy a house, but my account is currently set so that 10% of my deposits go to government bonds. Do government bonds count as usury? If it does, am I committing a mortal sin?
 
The government is the one offering you the deal. No, it’s not usury.
 
Please get some help from your pastor to understand what usury actually is, if investing in government bonds has you asking this question.
 
Not sure what country you’re in, but if it’s the United States, the rates on all but the 20- and 30-year bonds are less than 1%, and even the long bonds are all under 2%.

I certainly wouldn’t consider those usurious interest rates. In fact, if anything I’d be more worried about the real interest rate on the bonds (after accounting for inflation) being less than 0. If that were the case, then in real terms you would be getting paid less than you gave them, which would definitely not be usury. 🙂

By the way, I’m not sure what the portfolio is, or what your time horizon is, but just FYI, if it’s a bond fund, it’s going to lose value if interest rates increase. (Which they almost have to, given than they’re basically 0 now, unless you’re expecting negative nominal rates.) I mention that only because you said you’re 18, and I think a lot of people your age probably don’t understand how bond funds work.
 
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Give him a break, there us, from a practical standpoint, little information in what constitutres the sin of usury. It’s a shortcoming if modern Church teaching.
 
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If you have to quote some obscure papal encyclical, dating to 1745, with a Latin title and written in stilted language (heck, the salutation takes 3 lines)…no, it’s not “very clear” at all.

And no, OP, your investment is the furthest thing from usury. If anything you’re the one getting ripped off.
 
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It’s not clear at all. On the one hand Vix Pervenit in several places flatly condemns interest and insists that a lender should receive no more than the return of principle. The consequence if implemented would be that all lending would cease except between friends. Perhaps conscious of this, the encyclical goes on in chapter III to speak (rather vaguely) of separate contracts whereby a lender may make money. This sounds very like Islamic thinking on the subject.

However, it seems to me that a lender can fulfill the terms allowed by Vix Pervenit if he makes a clear distinction between principle and interest and if the interest is defined in a separate contract from the principle. If so, would it be sufficient to have a separate clause in the same contractual document? For that is precisely what all transactions on the capital markets do.
 
VonDerTann said:
If you have to quote some obscure papal encyclical, dating to 1745, with a Latin title and written in stilted language
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No papal encyclical is obscure;; they almost all have latin titles; the language is formal because it has to be. You could levy the same criticisms against the Credo. If you write off teaching with arguments of this kind, you wipe out the Magisterium.

In the post above I have given some reasons why this document is unclear, but it has nothing to do with the style and date.
 
Sorry, you’re wrong, it IS obscure. It’s not something written a year ago or widely reported on; its text is dry; purple; and written in a fashion where many adults would struggle with it, let alone an 18 year old who may have scruples. It’s 250 years old and is not the sort of writing that is commonly known of 250 years later, i.e. The Bible; Chaucer; Shakespeare, etc.

What you’re doing is falling into the trap of elevating every encyclical into the realm of “everyone understands it and knows how special it is, and it IS extra-special, just because it’s an encyclical!”

It’s obscure; my critique is valid. More importantly, this encyclical CANNOT be held up as proof that it’s “very clear” what usury is.
 
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Sorry von der Tann but it is not and never has been a Catholic principle that the date is important to the truth. If you haven’t understood that, you have missed the very essence of Catholicism.
 
The date most ceraintly is relevant to whether something is “obscure.”

…and with as much respect as I can muster, who the heck are you to suddenly decide who misses “the very essence of Catholicism” if one thinks an encyclical is “obscure?” You’ve started with “an old encyclical isn’t obscure because it’s never obscure,” and lept all the way to “and if
You disagree with me, you miss the “VERY ESSENCE” of Catholicism!”

Who are you to even decide what even IS the “very essence of Catholicism”, let alone who “finds” it or “misses it?”
 
@White_Tree i’m trying to start saving for a down payment on my house so my time frame is at the very least 5 years. It says its invested in bond ETF’s which i’m assuming work in a similar way just by the name. If I could I would put 100% of my money in the stock market but Wealthsimple insists on putting at least 10% bonds, I can’t actually do anything about it.
 
@patrick9999 Vix Pervenit doesn’t explain what counts as legitimate reason to ask for more money in 3.III. The encyclical also doesn’t mention if it means literal dollar value or the same dollar value after accounting for inflation, so I can’t say its conclusive even with that. I tried looking at the vatican.va catechism but all it says is that usurious dealings that cause hunger and death to the poor are bad, and that you should help the poor.
 
Eh, I’m not so sure I agree with putting $ in bonds.
An underutilized ticket to wealth? Utility stocks! Take your pick of a million steady, reliable ultility companies.
Most pay a steady 3-5% dividend annually; most have done very well over time. Best thing? You can choose not to buy coke or Pepsi, but you can’t really choose not to use electric power or the furnace in winter, i.e., utility companies often have a built-in customer base and the companies generally have a monopoly on those customers too.
 
yes, 90% of my money is in ETFs, some of which do have utility companies in them.
 
By modern, i.meant something a little more upto date than 1745. I stand by my statement.
 
No, but the understanding if money and economics has changed since that date, so the Church needs to ( desperately, IMO) update it’s teaching, which was difficult to understand in the first place.
 
VonDerTann said:
The date most ceraintly is relevant to whether something is “obscure.”
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Please! Then the Bible is obscure? St Augustine’s writings are obscure? Thomas Aquinas? These are all of much earlier date than 1745.

God sits outside time, unaffected by the date.

The letter to the Hebrews says Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever. That is the definition of the Truth; the entire magisterium of the Church is an ediifice whose pieces interlock. Pull one out just because you don’t like the date and the whole building collapses.

In a nation, a new law can contradict and supersede a previous one. This is impossible in the Church.
 
Much of Aquinas and Augustine ARE obscure. When you read them, you read abridged versions, translated to languages those men neither wrote nor spoke (and in the case of English, that didn’t exist when Augustine lived).

Even parts of the Bible are obscure:
Whole pages devoted to lineages, etc., that never make it into commentaries let alone mass readings.

Encyclincals? Often VERY obscure, moreso since unlike Aquinas and Augustine, they’re not subject to dozens of treatises about “what they mean.”
 
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