| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business. By Rowena Olegario. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii, 274 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02340-6.)

This incisive monograph retraces the emergence and maturation of the two largest American credit reporting firms, the Mercantile Agency, which became R. G. Dun and Company, and J. M. Bradstreet. Rowena Olegario shows how those dominant innovators tackled the fundamental problem of asymmetric information in mercantile trade. Each created sprawling networks of local attorneys who offered qualitative evaluations of business "character" alongside quantitative estimations of assets and liquidity. Initially, the firms disseminated their findings solely through confidential oral reports at agency offices. By the Civil War, they had developed a complex system of grading creditworthiness, distributed periodically through confidential ratings books. Thereafter, in response to the persistent entry of competitors, they extended coverage to ever more domestic businesses and to foreign countries and expanded into complementary areas of financial information. Suffusing all of those initiatives was an ideological defense of credit reporting as protecting the economy from bumbling or dishonest businessmen and as furnishing opportunities for poorly capitalized but promising entrepreneurs.

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