Working for debt banks, loan sharks, and the origins of financial exploitation in the United States
""Credit has always been at the center of American capitalism, but it underwent a major shift in the late nineteenth century. Along with the industrial and bureaucratic transitions, for the first time more and more workers used their future labor income as collateral to build debt, however...
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
New York
Columbia University Press
2024
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| Ausgabe: | 1. edition |
| Schlagworte: | |
| Online Zugang: | Inhaltsverzeichnis |
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Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | ""Credit has always been at the center of American capitalism, but it underwent a major shift in the late nineteenth century. Along with the industrial and bureaucratic transitions, for the first time more and more workers used their future labor income as collateral to build debt, however small their wages. Networks of companies made a profit out of payday advances, relying on wage assignments and garnishments to mitigate the risk associated with default. Far from a marginal or underground economy, salary lending became a major source of credit for workers all over the country, from African-American washerwomen to white foremen, from Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men. Together they became a republic of indebted wage-earners at the heart of the contemporary economy. But for Progressive reformers, these transactions threatened to revive a form of "wage slavery" reminiscent of a dark but recent past. In thriving to eradicate the "loan shark evil," they relied on strong moral assumptions about the needs faced by the working class, seeking in short to protect the white breadwinner from unfair extortion. These efforts paved the way for a takeover by commercial banks in the 1930s and 1940s: as modern consumer credit replaced old-world usury, these new actors profited from a set of federal policies to further associate legitimate borrowing with temporary budget needs faced by middle-class households. Loan Sharks uncovers the economic and social logics lying beneath our wage-based credit system. Building on unexplored corporate and judicial records and progressive reformers' archives, it studies working-class history and politics through the lens of credit market segmentation. From early twentieth-century anti-usury crusades to the first credit programs of the New Deal, this books shows how these movements legitimized moralistic endeavors at the expense of economic realities-ultimately dividing the credit market based on the borrower's class, race, and gender."" |
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| Beschreibung: | Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 335-354 ; Index |
| Beschreibung: | vi, 368 Seiten Illustrationen |
| ISBN: | 9780231202886 978-0-231-20288-6 9780231202893 978-0-231-20289-3 |