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Your Job Is Your Credit: Creating a Market for Loans to Salaried Employees in New York City, 1885–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Michael Easterly
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Extract

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a market in the personal debt of corporate and government employees was thriving in New York City and other major urban centers in the Northeastern andMidwestern United States. A set of shadowy entrepreneurs, colloquially known as “loan sharks,” offered short-term, high-rate advances that they called salary loans. Despite operating in violation of the law, primarily the prohibition against usury, the operations of these intermediaries had by 1912 reached an imposing scale. At least eighty-one such offices operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with millions of dollars in loans outstanding. Of these eighty-one offices, thirty-four belonged to interstate chains, the largest ofwhich stretched over sixtythree cities in the United States and Canada.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 651 - 660
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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