ABSTRACT
The HOLC loans saved the housing market, but they couldn’t rebuild it. For that, the New Deal would have to reinvent the very system of lending itself. President Roosevelt and his lieutenants saw two fatal flaws on lenders’ balance sheets: unsafe loans and unstable deposits. The HOLC and the banking holiday had temporarily neutralized these threats, but they could—and eventually, almost certainly would—rise again. Roosevelt was not satisfied with defusing the crisis. He wanted to prevent the next one.
