Thread by @dlondonwortel

In 1942, the bond-rating firm J. Austin White and Co. released a report analyzing municipal bonds and finances.

It's the most racist primary-source document I've ever come across. (1/7)

babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.…

The document starts off by saying that “it is necessary, in order properly to appraise the credit of a city, to subject it to the same tests which one would subject the individual citizens should they be asking to borrow money”

- fiscally problematic, but OK. But then... (2/7)

It describes how bond-purchasers need to examine the foreign extraction of a city in order to determine whether its citizens had the right "character."

Northern Europeans, for example, were "thrifty," where Southern Europeans "spen(t) money freely." (3/7)

But the document goes on to say that creditors need not consider how many "Negroes (sic), Mexicans, Indians, Chinese or Japanese" were in a community - because many of them did not vote, and "communities more broadly were "run entirely by the white people." (4/7)

The document goes on to "rate" cities based on both their economic diversity and their population, paying special attention to their proportion of "Northern" vs. "Southern" European population. (5/7)

Bond rating guides like this did for cities what the infamous FHA redlining maps did for homeowners: bar areas with marginalized populations from receiving financial aid. And both policies led to the kind of urban disinvestment and crises we saw in the 1970s. (6/7)

The solution here isn't to "liberalize" lending policies necessarily (#predatoryinclusion), but to replace extractive forms of financing with ones owned and operated by the people they serve (fin). (7/7)

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