Description
Book SynopsisToday, the federal government underwrites a financial system built around mortgage lending. In
The Dead Pledge, Judge Glock reveals the surprising origins of this entanglement in forgotten economic ideas and policies that held sway from the early twentieth century through the Great Depression.
Trade ReviewAmerica's farmers and home buyers long suffered from limited access to mortgage credit. In this engaging book, Glock aptly shows how federal interventions to boost mortgage lending fostered powerful special interests, which subsequently created new imbalances in the economy. That's why we continue to have housing bubbles and crashes. -- Richard Sylla, coauthor of
Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and DebtFrom one of the finest in a growing generation of historians writing at the intersection of finance and politics, we learn about the passions and the interests of financiers, politicians, intellectuals, reformers, and farmers who created the system of government-backed finance that has dominated the modern era.
The Dead Pledge provides a new history that will guide our ongoing debates about the appropriate role of government in finance and finance in society. -- Peter Conti-Brown, author of
The Power and Independence of the Federal ReserveJudge Glock's fascinating book,
The Dead Pledge, provides a new perspective on the evolution of American capitalism and the development of modern financial institutions by exploring the intriguing theme of "economic balance" and its allure to a wide range of economic actors, academics, and policy makers from the Progressive Era through the New Deal. -- Walter Friedman, author of
American Business History: A Very Short Introduction and
Fortune Tellers: America's First Economic ForecastersIn this sweeping narrative, Glock brings together the histories of American finance, economic thought, and policy making. Glock reframes our conventional understanding of when and how the “financialization” of American capitalism took place, defining it as an early twentieth-century phenomenon. The modern mortgage market, he explains with lucid prose, developed in tandem with—and inseparably from—the modern American state. An engaging read, sure to provoke debate. -- Laura Phillips Sawyer, author of
American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890-1940Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making the Land Liquid: The Roots of Land Banking
2. The Special Privileges of the Federal Banks
3. The Federal Land Banks and Financial Distress, 1916–1926
4. Falling Prices and Mortgage Crisis, 1926–1933
5. Herbert Hoover and the Urban-Mortgage Crisis in the Great Depression
6. A New Deal for Farm Mortgages
7. Housing, Heavy Industry, and the Forgotten New Deal Banking Act
8. An Economy Balanced by Mortgages
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
