American Bonds

How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation

Bibliographic Data

ID4157729
AuthorsDaniel Platt (0009-0007-5519-0293, University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, Illinois), Daniel E Platt (0000-0002-6826-928X, University of Illinois at Springfield, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume107
Issue3
Pages716-716
Publication date2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaaa345
OpenAlexW3111695265
LanguageEN
Citations received58

The scholarship on financial history has grown dramatically over the past fifteen years. Sarah L. Quinn's American Bonds stands as one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive installments in this body of work. In it, Quinn, a political sociologist, examines how the federal government has used credit as a tool of statecraft since the early republic, with a particular focus on the decades spanning the New Deal to the Great Society. She argues that credit allocation and securitization—the bundling of debt for resale—have allowed policy makers to address social and economic problems, in decidedly imperfect ways, while avoiding the nation's trademark hostility to activist government and wealth redistribution. Midway through the narrative, Quinn reports an arresting fact. When the U.S. House of Representatives surveyed federal credit programs in 1963, it discovered seventy-four active federal agencies holding or guaranteeing 15 percent of all private borrowing in the United States. With aid

Bond · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Government (linguistics · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Redistribution (election · Scholarship · Securitization · Economic Theory and Policy · Economic, financial, and policy analysis · Finance · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Public Administration

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