“Attending Islamic finance conferences these days, it’s hard not to notice how this investment class is catching on,” writes Bloomberg columnist William Pesek.

“The world’s roughly 1.5 billion Muslims need a way to bank and invest according to Islamic Sharia law, which bars receiving or paying interest on loans or deposits. A massive market infrastructure is being built to facilitate clients that include wildly rich Persian Gulf oil tycoons.

“Yet isn’t this industry being pirated by the Bank of Japan, Federal Reserve and other central banks destined to offer interest-free loans? As U.S. President Richard Nixon, echoing Milton Friedman, famously quipped in 1971: ‘We are all Keynesians now.’ By 2009, we may all be Islamic bankers, too.”