IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/uncgec/2012_006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The New Deal and the Origins of the Modern American Real Estate Loan Contract in the Building and Loan Industry

Author

Listed:
  • Rose, Jonathan

    () (Federal Reserve Board)

  • Snowden, Kenneth

    () (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics)

Abstract

We treat the direct reduction loan contract as an instance of financial innovation and describe its adoption within the building and loan (B&L) industry beginning in the 1880s and culminating in the 1930s. A long chain of complementary innovations at B&Ls gradually reduced the costs of adoption, leading to moderate use by the 1920s and potential for far greater use. In the 1930s, extreme dissatisfaction with other contracts radically altered the adoption calculus, as did new competition from FHA-insured lenders. Federal savings and loan charters built upon the accumulated innovations at B&Ls by emulating the small segment of the industry that had adopted direct reduction lending by the 1920s. Other policies helped restructure the liabilities of B&Ls to accommodate the loss of credit risk sharing and mutuality inherent to older contracts. New Deal policies therefore built upon and facilitated the ongoing process of financial innovation that brought the familiar modern loan contract to the conventional loan market.

Suggested Citation

  • Rose, Jonathan & Snowden, Kenneth, 2012. "The New Deal and the Origins of the Modern American Real Estate Loan Contract in the Building and Loan Industry," UNCG Economics Working Papers 12-6, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:uncgec:2012_006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bryan.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/12-06.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kenneth A. Snowden, 2010. "Covered Farm Mortgage Bonds in the Late Nineteenth Century U.S," NBER Working Papers 16242, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Snowden, Kenneth A, 1997. "Building and loan associations in the U.S., 1880-1893: the origins of localization in the residential mortgage market," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 227-250, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Mutuality and Financial Innovation
      by bbatiz in NEP-HIS blog on 2012-06-22 15:58:32

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rose, Jonathan D. & Snowden, Kenneth A., 2013. "The New Deal and the origins of the modern American real estate loan contract," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 548-566.
    2. Kenneth A. Snowden, 2010. "The Anatomy of a Residential Mortgage Crisis: A Look Back to the 1930s," NBER Working Papers 16244, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Howard Bodenhorn, 2016. "Two Centuries of Finance and Growth in the United States, 1790-1980," Working Papers id:11352, eSocialSciences.
    4. Fishback, Price & Fleitas, Sebastian & Rose, Jonathan & Snowden, Ken, 2020. "Collateral Damage: The Impact of Foreclosures on New Home Mortgage Lending in the 1930s," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(3), pages 853-885, September.
    5. Bhanot, Karan & Larsson, Carl F., 2018. "Uncovering the impact of regulatory uncertainty on credit spreads: A study of the U.S. covered bond experience," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 84-110.
    6. Jonathan D. Rose, 2018. "Contract Choice in the Interwar US Residential Mortgage Market," Working Paper Series WP-2018-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    7. Jonathan D. Rose, 2014. "The Prolonged Resolution of Troubled Real Estate Lenders during the 1930s," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective, pages 245-284, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Ordoñez, Guillermo, 2018. "Confidence banking and strategic default," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 101-113.
    9. W. Scott Frame & Lawrence J. White, 2009. "Technological change, financial innovation, and diffusion in banking," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2009-10, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    10. Cull, Robert & Davis, Lance E. & Lamoreaux, Naomi R. & Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, 2006. "Historical financing of small- and medium-size enterprises," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(11), pages 3017-3042, November.
    11. Jonathan D. Rose, 2012. "The prolonged resolution of troubled real estate lenders during the 1930s," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2012-31, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    12. Yiting Li & Guillaume Rocheteau & Pierre-Olivier Weill, 2012. "Liquidity and the Threat of Fraudulent Assets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(5), pages 000.
    13. Courtemanche, Charles & Snowden, Kenneth, 2011. "Repairing a Mortgage Crisis: HOLC Lending and Its Impact on Local Housing Markets," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 71(2), pages 307-337, June.
    14. Barry Eichengreen & Michael R. Haines & Matthew S. Jaremski & David Leblang, 2017. "Populists at the Polls: Economic Factors in the 1896 Presidential Election," NBER Working Papers 23932, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Larsson, Carl F., 2013. "What did Frederick the great know about financial engineering? A survey of recent covered bond market developments and research," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 22-39.
    16. David A. Price & John R. Walter, 2016. "Private Efforts for Affordable Mortgage Lending Before Fannie and Freddie," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue Q4, pages 321-351.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    New Deal; Building and Loan;

    JEL classification:

    • N00 - Economic History - - General - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:uncgec:2012_006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Albert Link). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/edncgus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.