Is debt more about stewardship or exploitation?

The lesson this week makes some bold statements about the undesirability of debt, and even the Bible sounds similar in passages such as Deut 15: "You will lend money to many nations but will never need to borrow." Loans and finance are an almost inescapable part of contemporary society - are they actually all that similar to the way debt worked in Biblical times? Our conversation ranges to other non-monetary kinds of debt, and we suspect there's some valuable nuance in this whole topic.