Dead Pledge

"Bailouts and a Balanced Economy: A New History of the American State, 1913-1939 shows that the kinds of bailouts that inspired such popular fury during the 2008 financial crisis emerged from a long history of government support for the financial sector, most especially for banks making mortgages. Glock argues that a central goal of the American government in the early 20th century, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, was to encourage new and riskier types of bank loans through government guarantees. He shows that the Great Depression led the government to act on its earliest promises and provide billions of dollars of bailouts to insolvent banks, even while it extended support to an ever greater proportion of banks and financiers. The book thus argues that the most significant and extensive government safety net that emerged from the first half of the twentieth century was the safety net protecting banks and lenders, especially those making long-term mortgages. The recent bailouts were only the culmination of these earlier reforms. The book explains that these government guarantees emerged from the combination of a new ideology and a new alliance of interest groups. The ideology declared it the duty of the government ensure a "balanced economy" between all productive sectors. In this conception, the government needed to act as a sort of fulcrum, bolstering any economic sector, such as agriculture, that fell behind. Without focused financial support for these sectors, the ideology argued, the economy risked falling "out of balance," or into "unbalanced growth," which could end in depression or disaster. Throughout the book, Glock shows how recovering this concept can help us make sense of the decisions and actions of policy makers during this crucial time"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.