The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective: Business, Regulation, and Culture

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 underscored the centrality of consumer credit for modern economies. While some Europeans were quick to blame unsustainable American patterns of borrowing and consumption, consumer indebtedness became a growing problem in other countries, too. At the same time, important differences in cultures of credit were evident in the seemingly homogenous global world of finance and consumption. This book explores the history of consumer credit in Europe, the United States, and Japan. It focuses on the period after World War II but also reaches further back, and it integrates anthropological and economic perspectives.

Table of Contents:
Towards a Global History of Credit in Modern Consumer Societies; J.Logemann PART I: LENDERS AND LENDING PRACTICES Selling Televisions on Credit: The Rise of Consumer Credit in Postwar France; I.Gaillard Moral or Modern Marketing? Sparkassen and Consumer Credit in West Germany; R.Belvederesi-Kochs Credit in a Nation of Savers: The Growth of Consumer Borrowing in Japan; A.Gordon PART II: BORROWERS AND CREDIT ACCESS The Business of Working-Class Credit: Subprime Markets in the United Kingdom since 1880; S.O'Connell American Women's Struggle to End Credit Discrimination in the Twentieth Century; L.Bowdish Virtually Creditworthy: Privacy, the Right to Information, and Consumer Credit Reporting in West Germany, 1950-1985; L.Frohman PART III: STATE REGULATION AND CREDIT POLICIES Banking on Consumer Credit: Explaining Patterns of Household Borrowing in the United States and France; G.Trumbull French Consumer Credit Policy in the 1950s and 1960s: From Opposition to Control; S.Effosse From Cradle to Bankruptcy? Credit Access and the American Welfare State; J.Logemann PART IV: CULTURES OF CREDIT Economic Agents and the Culture of Debt; S.Meyer Japan and the Western Model: An Economist's View of Cultures of Household Finance; C.Y.Horioka 'Ahead a Good Deal': Taking the Long View of Household Debt and Credit in American Life; L.Calder

About the Author :
JAN LOGEMANN Research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., USA, and director of the project 'Transatlantic Perspectives: Europe in the Eyes of European Immigrants to the United States, 1930-1980.' His work focuses on modern consumer societies and includes the forthcoming book, Trams or Tailfins: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States.