Forgive my amateurish approach at research - but luckily this may be one of those times where, unlike so much of human history, there might be simple and concise answers!
English Wikipedia's entry for Sulla references "Lynda Telford, A Dictator Reconsidered, p. 99" as citation #41 for the changes in money lending policies taking place during his first consulship (88 BCE).
This, first of Sulla's laws, is supposedly* responsible for instituting a rate cap and a mandatory switch from compound interest calculations to a simplified model in relation to all debts. Never mind the potential consequences to the velocity of investment denarii (my understanding is that the vast majority of loans at the time were consumption based anways) - I found this fascinating! I don't think the number "e" had been identified/defined at this point in history, let alone be expressible in Roman numerals, so I can only assume interest had to have been compounded manually, at varying levels of consistency across lenders. What a job that must have been! Surely, they must have utilized some sort of big as cheat sheet to make it easier...
In trying to find a (potentially still extant?) copy of the law, I came across Latin Wikipedia's listing of the "Leges Cornelia" which states (roughly from Babblefish) that they were passed during Sulla's dictatorship/second consulship, sometime between 82 BCE and 79 BCE.
To the best what I can find, Livy doesn't mention the interest rate changes in book 76-77, which would be after Sulla's first march on Rome, but before he left to fight Mithridates (please correct me if I'm mistaken). Book 89, however, explicitly mentions "With new laws, he strengthened the republic, diminished the powers of the tribunes of the plebs..." as well as packing the Senate/various priesthoods with cronies, and of course the proscriptions.
Can any experts point me towards more information about this? Was the loan interest law passed during the first consulship, and the rest passed during the dictatorship/second consulship? Is Wikipedia potentially [gasp] inaccurate?
*And finally - are these laws extant so I can run them through the babblefish/dictionary and read them for myself? My google-fu has failed me. The online preview for Telford's book excludes the mention of this law, and I am hesitant to drop cash before checking out the firsthand source.
Thank you! I hope you all enjoy the thrilling minutiae of long moot financial regulatory policy as much as I do.
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