Six moments

First, this summary of an observation made in 1850, from the Liberty Fund:

Frédéric Bastiat, while pondering the nature of war, concluded that society had always been divided into two classes - those who engaged in productive work and those who lived off their backs (1850)

For Bastiat, the two classes were those who owned everything, and those who did the work.

 

Next, from an 1895 book by Brooks Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams:

The Latins had little economic versatility; they lacked the instinct of the Greeks for commerce, or of the Syrians and Hindoos for manufactures. They were essentially land-owners, and, when endowed with the acquisitive faculty, usurers. The latter early developed into a distinct species, at once more subtle of intellect and more tenacious of life than the farmers, and on the disparity between these two types of men, the fate of all subsequent civilization has hinged.

For Adams, the two classes were farmers and usurers. Note that ancient Rome was an agricultural society, so that when Adams says "farmers" he means basically everyone, usurers aside.

From a 1916 essay by Vladimir Simkhovitch:

Because of this peculiar character of credit in certain historical periods, money lending was not a savory occupation. The gentleman, therefore, who in our industrial and mercantile life is a pillar of society and a respectable financier, is known by a different name under agricultural conditions. His name is Usurer.

Again, farmers and usurers in ancient Rome.

In the 1921 book Modern Economic Tendencies by Sidney A. Reeve, under the heading The Expansion of Financialization:

Indeed, the birth and growth of this practice, with its variations, has so revolutionalized our national methods of organizing industry, during the last quarter-century, that a business man of 1890 would find himself at sea to-day. The whole aspect of our more prominent engineering houses has been transformed, to meet this modern condition, from that of shops or designing-offices pure and simple into concerns more or less completely financial in character and function...

Reeve does not specifically identify the classes, but notes the clear advance of finance that had taken place, now more than 100 years ago.

From the abridged 1960 edition of Toynbee's A Study of History:

... the horizontal schism of a society along lines of class is not only peculiar to civilizations but is also a phenomenon which appears at the moment of their breakdowns and which is a distinctive mark of the periods of breakdown and disintegration, by contrast with its absence during the phases of genesis and growth.

Toynbee does not identify the classes, but does find momentous significance in the historical moment when the difference between classes becomes a "schism".

At Amazon, Michael Hudson's 2022 book The Destiny of Civilization is described:

A narrow rentier class has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.

The costs of industrial production have increased, Hudson says, because of increasing financial costs to employer and employee alike in our increasingly indebted world. I agree.

Hudson's "rentier" is the same as the "usurer" of Simkhovitch and Adams. Myself, I just refer to the growth of debt or the growth of finance, and sometimes just to interest cost.

 

The graph below does not show the cost of interest payments, or any cost. It shows how often the phrase "interest payments" arises in Google Books books.

Some but not all of the works quoted above are from Google Books.

Most of the quoted authors probably used the phrase "interest payments" at one time or another, but I didn't quote any of them using that phrase.

So what's the graph for? It shows general interest in the phrase "interest payments" among writers who perhaps saw increasing interest cost as a problem, or perhaps saw it as not a problem, or who happened to use the phrase for other reasons. I'm using the Ngrams image as a white noise background. In the foreground I added the names of the six authors quoted above, and the dates of the writing.

I think the rising background noise adds urgency to the quotes. So does the grand decline in use of the phrase since 1988, which stands as an indication of the (hopefully not yet final) final victory of the rentier class as described by Michael Hudson.

Notice also that in 1850, when Bastiat wrote, use of the phrase "interest payments" had not yet begun to percolate.

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