Papers presented by Mary Bridges since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
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Mary Bridges, Johns Hopkins University
2022 Mexico City
"Reputation Rating and the State: How the US Government Got in the Business of Foreign Credit Information in the Interwar Period "
Mary Bridges, Yale University
Abstract:
World War I precipitated major changes in the global status of the United States. Amid the upheaval of the war and its immediate aftermath, US trade skyrocketed, and New York displaced London as the global center of foreign trade. This paper examines administrative apparatus undergirding some of the tectonic changes in US global power and, in particular, the status of US business around the world. The presentation focuses on the role of the US bureaucrats in bolstering the nation’s power by gathering and inscribing credit information about foreign firms. Today, we typically think of the provision of credit information as the domain of the private sector, and recent scholarship has depicted the accumulation of credit information as a feature of market surveillance. This paper questions the role of the state in such information gathering, and it considers an expanded geography of information gathering. What happened when US officials were sent overseas to new context to assess firms’ reputations and financial histories? Drawing on primary sources from the US Commerce Department as well as trade journals and bank records from the 1920s and 1930s, the paper examines the work of Commerce Department officials as the foot soldiers of information collection and, by extension, mediators of public- and private-sector collaboration in reshaping US global power.
Keywords:
2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"Bankers’ Acceptances and Foreign Credit Information"
Mary Bridges, Yale University
Abstract:
This paper examines the connections between the credit practices of US overseas banks and the operation of the Federal Reserve System in the 1910s and 1920s. How did the newly created bankers’ acceptance market affect the day-to-day work of US bankers opening new foreign branches? The paper hypothesizes that US foreign branches played significant role in expanding the geography of US trade, though that role was not necessarily in generating acceptances. Instead, US foreign banks focused on amassing credit information about foreign firms and also in changing the formats of that information. The paper argues that the interplay between public institutions and banks shaped the contours of what financial information did and did not look like.