Credit Nation

Credit Nation PDF Author: Claire Priest
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241724
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
How American colonists laid the foundations of American capitalism with an economy built on credit Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic. In this major new history of early America, Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament departed from the customary ways that English law protected land and inheritance, enacting laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their assets to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America. Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, one where credit markets and liquidity were prioritized from the outset, where property rights and slaves became commodities for creditors' claims, and where legal institutions played a critical role in the Stamp Act crisis and other political episodes of the founding period.

Credit Nation

Credit Nation PDF Author: Claire Priest
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241724
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
How American colonists laid the foundations of American capitalism with an economy built on credit Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial and founding eras of the republic. In this major new history of early America, Claire Priest describes how the British Parliament departed from the customary ways that English law protected land and inheritance, enacting laws for the colonies that privileged creditors by defining land and slaves as commodities available to satisfy debts. Colonial governments, in turn, created local legal institutions that enabled people to further leverage their assets to obtain credit. Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America. Credit Nation presents a new vision of American economic history, one where credit markets and liquidity were prioritized from the outset, where property rights and slaves became commodities for creditors' claims, and where legal institutions played a critical role in the Stamp Act crisis and other political episodes of the founding period.

Credit Card Nation The Consequences Of America's Addiction To Credit

Credit Card Nation The Consequences Of America's Addiction To Credit PDF Author: Robert D. Manning
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Credit Card Nation is the first comprehensive look at an ongoing social and economic crisis-America's escalting dependence on credit. By locating consumer debt within the context of corporate and governmental debt.

Debtor Nation

Debtor Nation PDF Author: Louis Hyman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America, Debtor Nation traces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending, Debtor Nation presents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.

American Bonds

American Bonds PDF Author: Sarah L. Quinn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227071
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation’s founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. Sarah Quinn shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America’s complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution. Highly technical systems, securitization, and credit programs have been fundamental to how Americans determined what they could and should owe one another. Over time, government officials embraced credit as a political tool that allowed them to navigate an increasingly complex and fractured political system, affirming the government’s role as a consequential and creative market participant. Neither intermittent nor marginal, credit programs supported the growth of powerful industries, from railroads and farms to housing and finance; have been used for disaster relief, foreign policy, and military efforts; and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment, and mortgage securitization. Illuminating America’s market-heavy social policies, American Bonds illustrates how political institutions became involved in the nation’s lending practices.

One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe

One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe PDF Author: Robert E. Wright
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 0071543945
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Like its current citizens, the United States was born in debt-a debt so deep that it threatened to destroy the young nation. Thomas Jefferson considered the national debt a monstrous fraud on posterity, while Alexander Hamilton believed debt would help America prosper. Both, as it turns out, were right. One Nation Under Debt explores the untold history of America's first national debt, which arose from the immense sums needed to conduct the American Revolution. Noted economic historian Robert Wright, Ph.D. tells in riveting narrative how a subjugated but enlightened people cast off a great tyrant-“but their liberty, won with promises as well as with the blood of patriots, came at a high price.” He brings to life the key events that shaped the U.S. financial system and explains how the actions of our forefathers laid the groundwork for the debt we still carry today. As an economically tenuous nation by Revolution's end, America's people struggled to get on their feet. Wright outlines how the formation of a new government originally reduced the nation's debt-but, as debt was critical to this government's survival, it resurfaced, to be beaten back once more. Wright then reveals how political leaders began accumulating massive new debts to ensure their popularity, setting the financial stage for decades to come. Wright traces critical evolutionary developments-from Alexander Hamilton's creation of the nation's first modern capital market, to the use of national bonds to further financial goals, to the drafting of state constitutions that created non-predatory governments. He shows how, by the end of Andrew Jackson's administration, America's financial system was contributing to national growth while at the same time new national and state debts were amassing, sealing the fate for future generations.

Christian Nation

Christian Nation PDF Author: Frederic C. Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240118
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, America stumbles down a path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

Burning Nation (Divided We Fall, Book 2)

Burning Nation (Divided We Fall, Book 2) PDF Author: Trent Reedy
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545548764
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
In this wrenching sequel to Divided We Fall, Danny and friends fight to defend Idaho against a Federal takeover and the ravages of a Burning Nation. At the end of Divided We Fall, Danny Wright's beloved Idaho had been invaded by the federal government, their electricity shut off, their rights suspended. Danny goes into hiding with his friends in order to remain free. But after the state declares itself a Republic, Idaho rises to fight in a second American Civil War, and Danny is right in the center of the action, running guerrilla missions with his fellow soldiers to break the Federal occupation. Yet what at first seems like a straightforward battle against governmental repression quickly grows more complicated, as more states secede, more people die, and Danny discovers the true nature of some of his new allies. Chilling, powerful, and all too plausible, Burning Nation further establishes Trent Reedy as a provocative new voice in YA fiction.

Dream Nation

Dream Nation PDF Author: Stathis Gourgouris
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503630641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.

Dave Lieber's Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong

Dave Lieber's Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong PDF Author: Dave Lieber
Publisher: Dave Lieber
ISBN: 0970853084
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
From one of America's last crusading newspaper columnists, Dave Lieber¿s Watchdog Nation shares tips, tools and strategies to bite back when businesses and scammers do you wrong. Save time, money and aggravation. Learn how you can overcome the pickpockets that call themselves the electric company, the phone company, debt collectors, banks, scammers, e-mail spammers, door-to-door salesmen and countless others who want to harm you and your family. This book contains real stories about real people ¿ by the ultimate authority on the subject. Dave Lieber is The Watchdog investigative columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas. He has helped countless folks stand up for themselves, understand their rights, fight back and win. Consumers will understand how they can take advantage of laws, regulations and other methods that will help them overcome stubborn and uncaring customer service representatives on the other side of the world, companies large and small who ignore their complaints and the growing group of hard-core criminals who take advantage of modern technology to hurt you.

Prison Nation

Prison Nation PDF Author: Paul Wright
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135342563
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.