Two book presentations on the history of credit and debt

Living on credit

"I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me, I've made a fortune by using debt;" Donald Trump boasted back in January 2016. A century and a half earlier, Sojourner Truth wrote to Congress shortly after the end of slavery: "America owes to my people some of the dividends. (...) I shall make them understand that there is a debt to the Negro people which they can never repay." Life on Credit begins at the point where the most unfree in the USA were promised a future as freedpeople, but instead of reparations they themselves were repeatedly forced into unbearable debt relationships. Felix Krämer uses the term debt difference to describe this range of different meanings of debt in the everyday lives of different people, which he has analysed through US history from the end of slavery to the present day. His book sheds light on the history of various forms of debt in the USA. In addition to the structural debt of black sharecroppers in the southern states since the last third of the 19th century, it examines images of loan sharks and anti-Semitism since the 1920s. The study describes the effects of property loans and mortgages since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It shows how credit cards and student loans brought neoliberalism into people's pockets and bank accounts and what effect the financial crisis of 2007/2008 had on borrowers and workers. African Americans, working class women and migrants were repeatedly exposed to higher credit risks. Living on Credit exposes this production line of socio-economic difference and the "wealth gap" in the USA and thus makes a contribution to the new history of capitalism.

On credit

"Credit helps some people get on the horse and some people under the ground" was a saying in the 1860s. According to this saying, credit is both a stirrup-holder and a gravedigger. But what did this mean for those who gave and utilised credit? In his comprehensive study, Matthias Ruoss examines how individuals dealt with credit insecurities and how society understood them. To this end, he focusses on precarious economies in German-speaking Europe and shows how the contemporary handling of contingencies shaped social patterns and social orders. Using the example of sewing machines and furniture, which were most frequently traded on credit during the period of high industrialisation, household-centred production contexts surrounding instalment loans are made visible. Labour, gender ideology and political power, as Matthias Ruoss explains in his analytical study of capitalism, accelerated and coordinated the expansion of the credit nexus.