Recent histories of racial capitalism in the twentieth-century United States have illuminated a multitude of public policies that created residential segregation, facilitated urban disinvestment, and sustained racial disparities in economic security and political power. Destin Jenkins adds an important new chapter to the story with his extraordinary history of municipal debt, which traces the evolution of the municipal bond market and its close relationship to San Francisco’s elected and appointed officials across the second half of the twentieth century. By exploring the world of bondholders and the impact they had on San Francisco, Jenkins illuminates how American cities became dependent on “financiers, rating agencies, and the bond market for their most fundamental responsibilities,” and exposes the dire consequences of this dependence for urban democracy (1).
Jenkins joins a growing number of scholars who trace key features of neoliberalism to the New Deal order. New Deal reforms situated commercial banks as...
University of California Press