(This is the last installment of a three-part essay. The other parts are here and here.) A Capital Bank As its title suggests, the best-known history of the RFC, James Stuart Olson's (1982) Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933 -1940, is nothing…
(This is the second installment of a three-part essay. The first part is here.) Big Engines that Couldn't Although Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was "more largely a banker's loan bank than anything else" (Ebersole 1933, 477), financial institutions were never the only firms eligible for its…
(In writing this series, I allowed myself to skip over some topics. But now that I'm turning the series into a book, to be published by the University of Chicago Press, I have to close those gaps. The most important gap by far concerns the Reconstruction Finance…