I am not sure if anyone noticed this but on the latest Domestic Advisor screen (ign.com) there is a section for "Interest income" under "Income".
I wonder how this will be implemented? Will you lend money to other civilizations and then recoup interest? Is it a way to interfere (discretely) with wars between 2 other civs?
Most likely a similar system to SMAC where you give a number of credits for a small number over time. Payments interupted of course by time. I like the feature, but would like to see shorter pay periods, or way to bargain for different pay scales, or for units, or whatever. It seems the bargaining table feature will include this, but it is yet to be seen how robust that feature is, despite Firaxis's claims