Borrow: The American Way of Debt

Credit is both a ticket to good times and an economic cancer in this savvy history of consumer debt. Economic historian Hyman takes readers from the 19th century, when household borrowing was considered immoral and illegal, to our current reliance on ubiquitous consumer borrowing as economic engine and marker of middle-class respectability. It’s a story of unsung but crucial innovations in the plumbing of the economy: mass mortgage lending and securitization, which caused as much mischief in the Great Depression as in today’s subprime crisis; auto-loan operations that turned carmakers into giant banks; the fraud-ridden construction of the Visa and Mastercard credit card networks. Intelligently analyzing both the economics and the social meaning of debt, Hyman grounds these developments in commercial imperatives and an evolving consumer culture, and links them to deeper economic upheavals. Credit fueled growth, he argues, but it also generated instability and asset bubbles, and corroded America’s productive capacities: as consumer lending became more profitable than actually making things, corporations poured their money into financing credit and killed off their manufacturing operations. Stocked with colorful personalities and trenchant insights, Hyman’s lucid, entertaining, and timely treatise illuminates the murky processes by which debt became the troubled center of economic life. Photos. (Jan.)