It's important to understand that what Austrian Economists call the “interest rate” isn’t necessarily a moral defense of riba but a reflection of time preference, or the natural ratio between present and future goods.

The same principle still operates in a riba-free order where real profit-sharing, savings, production decisions have to align with how people value time. The "interest rate" would basically be a "profit rate". The natural rate of return on capital would still exist.

So even without interest-bearing loans, it still stands that when you distort those natural intertemporal signals through credit expansion or fiat manipulation, you invariably get the same illusion of prosperity followed by collapse, only this time it's stamped with the "halal" label.