Skip Navigation


Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 31, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(4):651-660; doi:10.1093/es/khp045
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
10/4/651    most recent
khp045v2
khp045v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Easterly, M.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

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

Michael Easterly

MICHAEL EASTERLY completed his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles, in September 2008 and is now an independent scholar

Contact information: 458 Renfro Ct., Glen Burnie, MD 21060; E-mail: easterly.phd@gmail.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

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 and Midwestern 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 of which stretched over sixty-three cities in the United States and Canada.

By the mid-1920s, these lenders had all but disappeared. However, a new type of intermediary, the industrial loan company, had emerged and was serving substantially the same customers. More . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   I
 

   II
 

   III
 

   IV
 

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?