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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative
91.3  
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December, 2004
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Book Review



The Market, the State, and the Export-Import Bank of the United States, 1934–2000. By William H. Becker and William M. McClenahan Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii, 340 pp. $80.00, ISBN 0-521-81143-0.)

The Export-Import Bank's directors decided to celebrate the institution's sixty-fifth birthday by commissioning a book. The goal was to allow them to see how things had gone in the past and to prepare for the future. In a competitive process, William H. Becker and William M. McClenahan Jr. won the right to prepare the manuscript. Though clearly a scholarly undertaking, the book is rather like a semi-official history and certainly one that will bring smiles to the faces of most bank employees, both past and present. 1
      As the title indicates, the authors are interested in the relationship of the Export-Import Bank to the "state" and the "market." From its inception, bank officials had to serve multiple constituencies. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, and the War (later Defense) Department often wanted it to make loans in support of foreign policy goals. At times, however, Treasury Department officials complained that some of the bank's practices were adding to the federal deficit. Members of Congress occasionally got into the act either by pushing the bank to be more aggressive in assisting exporters from their states or, contrariwise, by arguing that the bank was wasting money by helping exporters who really did not need it. . . .

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