City of Debtors
A Century of Fringe Finance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Henry Schlegel (University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 694-694 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jay349 |
| OpenAlex | W2905620763 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Anne Fleming begins City of Debtors with a continuing irony of capitalism. Everyone wants to lend, and at the lowest possible rates, to people who really do not need money and so pose little risk from default, while few wish to lend, except at the highest rates, to those people who really need money and so pose a great risk of default, to people who can barely, if at all, pay such rates without risking immiseration. She sets out to look at what people of good will have tried to do to address this circumstance with respect to what she calls “fringe finance”—those lenders who might be seen as the noncriminal “loan sharks” or small-sum lenders. This great topic is well and thoroughly explored by Fleming for the period between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century, most often focused on events in New York City. The characters we meet—borrowers, lenders of various kinds, do-gooders (initially the Russell Sage Foundation, though only until a continuation of legislative activity threatened its tax-exempt status), politicians, and administrators—are vividly sketched and, equally importantly, embedded in the larger story she tells about the many, and in some ways predictable, strategies those people with some agency used to further their interests as they saw them. It is a great show that makes clear that law seen narrowly misses much of what is going on at any time in any long-term crusade undertaken to address a social or economic problem
Agency (philosophy · Business · Default · Economics · Irony · Law and economics · Loan · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Wish · Finance · History · Housing Market and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |