Off-Budget and Decentralized

This chapter outlines the growth of credit programs from the Second World War through the postwar era. This period saw a surge in wartime credit, the end of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and the emergence of government support for venture capital and school loans. As postwar credit programs moved capital and pioneered new ways of lending, they shaped how and where U.S. companies lent money. They also helped lift a generation of white families and systematically exclude African Americans. Discriminatory and decentralized, off-budget and complex, the credit programs were a key component of America's peculiar developmental state. Indeed, credit programs are not aberrations in the system. They are a core aspect of how the system works.