The Business of Debt offers a visual analysis of the changing scope of the municipal bond business from the early moments of the Great Depression to the 1980s, a decade described by city officials, bankers, and others as one of great “Chaos.” By employing the methods of data visualization, the project moves from one period of precarity to another, documenting, in the years between, the remarkable growth of a tight-knit profession of bankers and bond attorneys.

The project consists of four components. The “Mapping Collapse” allows users to dive into the shifting, and increasingly depressed world of high finance. The second, “Bond Traders,” identifies the location, density, and temporal distribution of banking firms operating between 1931 and 1981. “Bond Attorneys” provides the location and names of firms during the same period of time. Finally, “San Francisco” identifies the banks and names of employees involved in the municipal bond business, as well as the area of specialization where available. Together, this project is a companion website to Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021). 

But why should we care about the sleepy, routine business of municipal bonds? Municipal bonds are financial instruments issued by states, cities, counties and other state and local governments to finance often large-scale projects such as schools, roads, and sewer systems. Through such infrastructural investments, municipal bonds, and the market through which such bonds were bought and sold, contributed to the economic development of post-World War II America. Indeed, the municipal bond market had seen 3,300 new issues of long-term bonds totaling $1.2 billion in 1946. Some twenty years later, state and local governments nearly doubled the number of bond issues, raising about $11.1 billion. All told, state and local indebtedness had risen from $16.5 billion in 1945 to $99 billion by July 1965.

The Business of Debt helps scholars identify a cast of characters—bankers and bond attorneys—who literally helped underwrite the so-called New South, the Rustbelt, and the Sunbelt, among other socio-political arrangements of the twentieth century. And it helps user see that the bond market was made not through supply and demand or some other autonomous force. Rather, it was made by a relatively small group of identifiable people who bought, sold, held, and resold debt, and who helped turn cities into tax-exempt investment vehicles.