A Jakarta peer-to-peer lender spent six years building a loan book on a rate Indonesia’s financial regulator cut in half this January, without asking her opinion first. In the same year the regulator raised the minimum capital a licensed lender must hold to US$770,000 (Rp12.5 billion), a bar that has already pushed twelve of her competitors out of the market. If your own business runs on a rate, a permit, or a quota some regulator writes and rewrites without consulting you, the same floor is waiting under your feet too.
In Rome, a little under two thousand years earlier, a slave named Epictetus served a secretary to the emperor Nero. His master, a man named Epaphroditus, liked to remind him often exactly whose body he was standing in.
One afternoon, later students said, Epaphroditus began twisting Epictetus’s leg for his own amusement.
Epictetus told him, in the same flat voice he used for everything, that the leg was going to break. It broke.
He did not scream.
“Did I not tell you that it would break,” he said, and went back to whatever he had been doing before his master interrupted him.
He kept that same voice for the rest of his life, first as a slave and later as a free man running his own school in Nicopolis, on Greece’s western coast. He built the whole of his teaching on one distinction: some things are up to you, and some things are not, and the entire work of a wise life is telling them apart.
He had no OJK circular and no compliance deadline. He had a master who could break his leg for sport, which is the same problem, arriving through a different door.
The Jakarta lender is watching her own leg get twisted by a body she does not sit on. Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority, known as the OJK, restructured what it calls the “economic benefit” a lender may collect: a flat 0.2 percent a day through 2025, cut to 0.1 percent a day this January, with sharper caps again on the shortest, smallest loans.1 Nobody at her company was in the room when the regulator set the number.
The capital rule arrived the same season. A licensed platform now has to hold US$770,000 in paid-up capital just to keep its licence, a threshold that rose in stages through 2025 and that twelve platforms did not clear.
None of it was ever hers to negotiate.
None of it was ever hers to negotiate.
You do not get a vote on the cap either. You get everything that happens after it.
What was hers: which loans she keeps writing under the new number, and which she stops without telling anyone. The rule prices short, small consumer loans worse than longer, productive ones, so the book she is building this year looks different from the one she built the last six, tilted toward borrowers who can carry a longer loan at a margin that still clears.
What was hers, too: whether she raises the rest of the capital now, while investors still believe in the model, or waits until the number is the only question anyone asks in a raise.
She chose now.
Epictetus never got his leg back, and he spent no more words on the man who broke it. He gave the rest of his life to the one part of him that had never belonged to anyone else.
Some things are within our power, and some are not.
He told his students exactly what his own leg had already proved: some things are within our power, and some are not.
The rate was never hers to set.
The book underneath it still is.
Footnotes
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The same circular still prices a longer, larger productive loan higher than a short, small consumer one, which is exactly the mix she is now shrinking toward. ↩