Investigators at University of Toronto Describe Findings in Economics (“a Country of Long Credits and Long Seasons”the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Agrarian Question): Economics

2025 DEC 17 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Economics Daily Report -- Current study results on Economics have been published. According to news reporting out of Toronto, Canada, by NewsRx editors, the research stated, “A major contradiction in U.S. capitalism before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was a mismatch between the credit needs of agriculture and the financial resources of the country. Pitching the South and the West against the Northeast, this mismatch was indexed to the agricultural season as planting, harvesting, and marketing crops would lead to increased demands for currency and credit in the agrarian regions that caused outflows from financial centers and threatened the stability of money markets.”

Funders for this research include New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University, Fox International Fellowship Program, Yale University, Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), University of British Columbia, ACEV Foundation.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the University of Toronto, “A well-known historical dynamic that has seldom received critical theoretical attention, the problem of seasonality was particularly severe when it came to cotton. Focusing on the early years of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, I ask what it means to understand the historical geography of the Federal Reserve in light of the ‘agrarian question.’ Attending to the particularities of capitalist development in agriculture and the racialized class relations of the Southern countryside, I draw on archival research to track the interventions of the Atlanta Bank aimed at better synchronizing the times of cotton and credit, 1914 to 1929, by providing seasonal liquidity and carrying banks through bad harvests and downward price spirals.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Reinterpreted through the comparative lens of the agrarian question, these practices open a space to center processes of uneven development in the historical geography of the U.S. Federal Reserve System.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: “a Country of Long Credits and Long Seasons”the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Agrarian Question. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025. Annals of the American Association of Geographers can be contacted at: Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2-4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon OX14 4RN, Oxon, England.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Mikael Omstedt, University of Toronto, Dept. of Geography and Planning, Toronto, On, Canada.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2580632. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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