Le New Deal de Roosevelt: la face cachée

Alors que des démocrates progressistes ont lancé il y a peu le "Green New Deal", le professeur d'histoire Louis Hyman apporte un éclairage nouveau sur le New Deal de Franklin Delano Roosevelt dont le nom a inspiré le projet cher à Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Si on retient souvent de l'ensemble du programme de Roosevelt qu'il marque le début de l'intervention de l'état, on néglige généralement de souligner que tout un pan se retrouve entre les mains du secteur privé. Ce dernier volet, paradoxalement, sera géré par un ancien conseiller d'Herbert Hoover, injustement considéré comme le grand responsable de cette grave crise qui marque toute une décennie.

 "Under Hoover, Jones was appointed to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was tasked with recapitalizing regional banks. Like the other men on Hoover’s RFC, Jones was a banker—he was president of the Texas Commerce Bank system—but he was also a prominent real-estate developer and an original investor in the company that became Exxon. When FDR came to power, he promoted Jones, who had been a Democrat since the heady populist days of William Jennings Bryan, to the head of the RFC. Jones understood well the need to take risks, and how risk-averse the world of finance had become during the Depression; his basic mission was to restore safe, long-term investment opportunities.

Jones focused first on housing. He appointed James Moffett, a vice president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, as head of the Federal Housing Administration. With the assistance of National City Bank employees “loaned” to the FHA, Moffett and others designed mechanisms to channel the money sitting in banks back into the world in the form of mortgages. Their key innovation was to have lenders chip into an insurance pool, organized by the federal government. If a borrower defaulted on a mortgage, the lender would be paid out of the pool in low-yielding bonds. The lender would not lose the principal of the mortgage, but neither would the lender have an incentive to do business with the obviously uncreditworthy."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/surprising-truth-about-roosevelts-new-deal/584209/