BiblioVault - Books about Finance

Dangerous Donations

Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902-1930

Eric Anderson & Alfred A. Moss, Jr.

University of Missouri Press, 1999

Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., offer a new examination of the impact of northern philanthropy on southern black education, giving special attention to the "Ogden movement," the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, and the Episcopal American Church Institute for Negroes. Anderson and Moss present significant reinterpretations of key figures in African American education, including Booker T. Washington, William H. Baldwin, Jr., George Foster Peabody, and Thomas Jesse Jones.

Dangerous Donations explores both the great influence of the philanthropic foundations and the important limitations on their power. White racial radicals were suspicious that the northern agencies sought to undermine the southern system of race relations, "training negroes in the vain hope of social equality with whites." This criticism forced the philanthropists and their agents to move cautiously, seeking white southern cooperation whenever possible. Despite repeated compromises, northern philanthropists maintained a vision of race relations and black potential significantly different from that held by the South’s white majority.

Blacks challenged the foundations, expressing their own educational agendas in a variety of ways, including demands for black teachers, resistance to any distinctive racial curricula, and, in some cases, support for independent black schools. The millions of dollars in self-help philanthropy contributed by African Americans also indicated their refusal to give complete control of their schools to either the white South or distant philanthropists in the North.

No other scholars, according to Louis R. Harlan, "have examined the controversial role of philanthropy with the same coolness, analytical skill, and persistent search for the truth as Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss... [they] have made an outstanding contribution to the history of education for both races in the segregated South of 1900 to 1930."

[more]

Debt, Investment, Slaves

Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885

Richard Holcombe Kilbourne

University of Alabama Press, 2013

A thorough survey of parish mortgage records and other manuscript collections led to the conclusion that most credit relationships, collateralized and uncollateralized, were grounded in slave property as opposed to land or other forms of wealth. Uncollateralized debt was directly dependent on the relative wealth of parish residents, and the bulk of most portfolios consisted of slaves.

Emancipation and the Civil War occasioned a monumental credit implosion from which the local economy never recovered, at least for the remainder of the 19th century. Kilbourne makes an extensive examination of postwar debt distress and the evolution of sharecropping and tenancy. Even the wealthiest households were in the throes of debt distress as was evidenced by the numerous suits by wives for separations of property.

A peculiar recoding requirement for crop privileges and pledges in the years from 1870 to 1880 made it possible to determine the amount of credit available in the postwar decades. Kilbourne shows that credit facilities contracted by 90 percent in the two decades following the Civil War. The decline in credit facilities parallels the decline in household wealth levels.

Kilbourne disagrees with earlier scholars on the role of furnishing merchants in shaping the postbellum agricultural order. Furnishing merchants did become relatively more important in financing agriculture in the postwar decade, but they were not the successors of antebellum firms. Local merchants actually provided less credit than they had furnished before the Civil War to small cotton farmers who had made up two-thirds of the growers in the parish in 1860.

Slavery made for a unique labor market, and this situation influenced the evolution of the credit system in the region. Emancipation was a revolutionary break with what had gone before. The focus of the credit system shifted from slaves to cotton. Land did form most postbellum planter portfolios, but it did not fill the void left by emancipation, and wealth levels remained substantially below antebellum ones. The credit system became highly localized in the postwar decades, and this fact was instrumental in shaping postbellum planting arrangements.

[more]

Debt to Society

Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Miranda Joseph

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society”? How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students?

In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, Joseph argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives.

Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, Debt to Society exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within our society. Joseph demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.

[more]

Democracy Declined

The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection

Mallory E. SoRelle

University of Chicago Press, 2020

As Elizabeth Warren memorably wrote, “It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street.” More than a century after the government embraced credit to fuel the American economy, consumer financial protections in the increasingly complex financial system still place the onus on individuals to sift through fine print for assurance that they are not vulnerable to predatory lending and other pitfalls of consumer financing and growing debt.
In Democracy Declined, Mallory E. SoRelle argues that the failure of federal policy makers to curb risky practices can be explained by the evolution of consumer finance policies aimed at encouraging easy credit in part by foregoing more stringent regulation. Furthermore, SoRelle explains how angry borrowers’ experiences with these policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals—they threaten the stability of entire economies. SoRelle identifies pathways to mitigate these potentially disastrous consequences through greater public participation.

[more]

Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies

Edited by Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Derivatives were responsible for one of the worst financial meltdowns in history, one from which we have not yet fully recovered. However, they are likewise capable of generating some of the most incredible wealth we have ever seen. This book asks how we might ensure the latter while avoiding the former. Looking past the usual arguments for the regulation or abolition of derivative finance, it asks a more probing question: what kinds of social institutions and policies would we need to put in place to both avail ourselves of the derivative’s wealth production and make sure that production benefits all of us?

To answer that question, the contributors to this book draw upon their deep backgrounds in finance, social science, art, and the humanities to create a new way of understanding derivative finance that does justice to its social and cultural dimensions. They offer a two-pronged analysis. First, they develop a social understanding of the derivative that casts it in the light of anthropological concepts such as the gift, ritual, play, dividuality, and performativity. Second, they develop a derivative understanding of the social, using financial concepts such as risk, hedging, optionality, and arbitrage to uncover new dimensions of contemporary social reality. In doing so, they construct a necessary, renewed vision of derivative finance as a deeply embedded aspect not just of our economics but our culture.

[more]

Designed to Fail

Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve

Roseann Liu

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A provocative examination of how systemic racism in education funding is sustained.

For people who care about urban school districts like Philadelphia’s, addressing the challenges that these schools face often boils down to the need for more money. But why are urban districts that serve Black and Brown students still so perennially underfunded compared to majority-white ones? Why is racial equity in school funding so hard to achieve?

In Designed to Fail, Roseann Liu provides an inside look at the Pennsylvania state legislature and campaigns for fair funding to show how those responsible for the distribution of school funding work to maintain the privileges of majority-white school districts. Liu analyzes how colorblind policies, political structures, and the maintenance of the status quo by people in power perpetuate wide and deepening racial disparities in education funding. Taking a lesson from community organizers fighting for a racially equitable school funding system, Liu’s work is a bold call to address structural racism at the root and organize from a place of abundant justice.

[more]

Dethroning historical reputations

universities, museums and the commemoration of benefactors

Edited by Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman

University of London Press, 2018

The campaigns in universities across the world to reject, rename and remove historic benefactions have brought the present into collision with the past. In Britain the attempt to remove a statue of one of Oxford’s most famous benefactors, the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, has spread to other universities and their benefactors, and now also affects civic monuments and statues in towns and cities across the country. In the United States, memorials to leaders of the Confederacy in the American Civil War and to other slaveholders have been the subject of intense dispute. Should we continue to honour benefactors and historic figures whose actions are now deemed ethically unacceptable? How can we reconcile the views held by our ancestors with those we now hold today? Should we even try, acknowledging, in the words of the novelist L. P. Hartley, that ‘the past is another country; they do things differently there’? The essays in this interdisciplinary collection are drawn from a conference at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. Historians, fundraisers, a sociologist and a museum director examine these current issues from different perspectives, with an introductory essay by Sir David Cannadine, president of the British Academy. Together they explore an emerging conflict between the past and present, history and ideology, and benefactors and their critics. The open access edition of this book can be found at http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/pellewgoldman.

[more]

Dictionary for Business & Finance

John V. Terry

University of Arkansas Press, 1995

This revised and expanded edition of the Dictionary for Business & Finance defines terms from every field of business, as well as economics, statistics, and management and many words and expressions from other fields which have been adopted for special use by the business community. In this new edition, John V. Terry has added more than two hundred terms that help define the rapidly changing global economy of the late 1990s—terms like “European Currency Unit,” “Datsu-sara,” and “Keiretsu.” Of particular value to the student and business person alike are appendices for ratios, equations, formulas, abbreviations, and general financial and investment information.

In a clear, easy-to-follow style, Dictionary for Business & Finance goes directly to the business usage of a word or term, making it unnecessary to wade through irrelevant definitions.

[more]

The Distributional Aspects of Social Security and Social Security Reform

Edited by Martin Feldstein and Jeffrey B. Liebman

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Social security is the largest and perhaps the most popular program run by the federal government. Given the projected increase in both individual life expectancy and sheer number of retirees, however, the current system faces an eventual overload. Alternative proposals have emerged, ranging from reductions in future benefits to a rise in taxrevenue to various forms of investment-based personal retirement accounts.

As this volume suggests, the distributional consequences of these proposals are substantially different and may disproportionately affect those groups who depend on social security to avoid poverty in old age. Together, these studies persuasively show that appropriately designed investment-based social security reforms can effectively reduce the long-term burden of an aging society on future taxpayers, increase the expected future income of retirees, and mitigate poverty rates among the elderly.

[more]