Founding finance : how debt, speculation, foreclosures, protests, and crackdowns made us a nation

Founding finance : how debt, speculation, foreclosures, protests, and crackdowns made us a nation

How debt, speculation, foreclosures, protests, and crackdowns made us a nation

1st ed.

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2012.

viii, 274 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

336.73 H714 2012

(OCoLC)783173222

This brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution--conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today. Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America's founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America's economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors' prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors ...--Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-261) and index.
L2022M135

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