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THREAD—America's First Bond Market Was Backed By Enslaved Human Beings forbes.com/sites/pedrodac…
"Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became a defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land wasn't worth much and banks didn't exist, most lending was based on human property." nytimes.com/interactive/20…
"In several Southern counties, slave mortgages injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by enslaved workers. - @just_shelter
"Global financial markets got in on the action. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers, it was a Dutch firm that put up the money.
"The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. A majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market.
"Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States.
"To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by slave mortgages and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. During slavery’s boom time, banks did swift business in bonds, finding buyers in Hamburg and Amsterdam, in Boston and Philadelphia."
White enslavers "also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans.
"Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points."
"Consider a Wall Street instrument as modern sounding as collateralized debt obligations or CDOs, those ticking time bombs backed by inflated home prices in the 2000s. CDOs were the grandchildren of mortgage backed securities backed enslaved people in the 1820s and 1830s."
