The Mount of piety (Monte de piedad) were also common in Spain. Monte de Piedad de Dueñas is the oldest one in Spain founded in Palencia around 1500. But Monte de Piedad de Madrid (1720) by a Franciscan monk was the most important one and it was created influenced by the Italian ones.

> The institution originated in Italy in the fifteenth century, where it gave poor people access to loans with reasonable interest rates. It used funds from charitable donors as capital, and made loans to the poor so they could avoid going to exploitative lenders. Borrowers offered valuables as collateral, making the mount of piety more like a pawn shop than a bank.

So the Belgian one is still running. Acceptable collateral [1]:

Jewellery, precious stones, and gold

Luxury watches, gold pocket watches, and antique clocks

Luxury leather goods (handbags, belts, etc. - certain brands only)

Comics and collected editions, and derived objects

Paintings

Objets d'art, sculptures, ivories, bronzes, and porcelain

Silverware

Glassware and crystal bearing a recognised mark

Coins of numismatic value

Wines and spirits of exceptional quality

High-end bicycles in excellent condition

Musical instruments

Now, i didn't grow up poor in Belgium, but these don't immediately strike me as the kind of things that the credit-hungry poor are likely to have lying around the place in any great quantity.

Incidentally, this was an interesting list to translate (with machine help!), because there are some expressions that don't have really good equivalents. The French version distinguishes "montres de poche" from those "à goussets", but i think a gousset is just a particular kind of pocket. I'm not entirely sure what "livres de collections" are, but in context it seems to mean fancy hardback editions of works, like those put out by the Folio Society [2]. Tableaux are paintings, not tables, Google. Cristaux signés seems to mean glass crystal items marked by their manufacturer - apparently British crystal is marked like that [3], but i've never heard anyone be concerned about it - and it seems to be a metonym for high quality. Similarly, for bicycles, "de marque" literally means "branded", but here i think it has a connotation of being made by a fancy manufacturer (Rolls-Royce is a marque, Vauxhall is a make!).

[1] https://www.montdepiete.be/gages-lots

[2] Anyone want an 80 quid Heinlein? https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/stranger-in-a-strange-land.h...

[3] http://www.great-glass.co.uk/glass%20notes/markd-h.htm

Well, there's a difference between asset-poor and cashflow-poor. You might have a couple of valuables accumulated over generations - watches, silverware, etc. are good examples - but not liquid cash. Even in modern times, there are plenty of people with a small and perhaps negative net worth but who own a mortgaged house, and taking out a loan using that house as collateral is common.

Also, because it gives loans to be repaid within a year, you'd better have an immediate plan of how to earn the money back.

I bet this was more useful for, say, small-time merchants who needed to do repairs or get a pack animal or something, and not for the destitute who needed alms.

> I'm not entirely sure what "livres de collections" are, but in context it seems to mean fancy hardback editions of works, like those put out by the Folio Society [2].

It doesn't just means « fancy », but also old and rare. In a French speaking context, loose Pléiade prints (the default « fancy » edition) might not gather much interest unless it's sold as a whole collection.

On the other hand any good quality early edition of the well known writers of the 18th or 19th c. is worth at the very least a few hundreds. If you have a first edition print of any of Jules Verne's books by Hetzel, that's worth tens of thousands. A full copy of the first or second edition of the Description de l'Égypte is worth hundreds of thousands.

If poor people didn't own that kind of stuff then pawn shops wouldn't exist, but they clearly do and are a good business in impoverished neighbourhoods.

Pawn shops don't sell the stuff listed here, for the most part. They sell common trinkets.

Well you can't just give out loans to the poor with no element of collateral... Otherwise why pay back the loan?

Aside: why are the timestamps on this post and comments a day later than they were posted?

Are they ever used for fencing?