Credit card, device used to obtain consumer credit at the time of purchasing an article or service. Credit cards may be issued by a business, such as a department store or an oil company, to m...

Credit union, cooperative financial institution that makes low-interest personal loans to its members. It is usually composed of persons from the same occupational group or the same local comm...

Credit, letter of, commercial instrument through which a bank or other financial institution instructs a correspondent institution to advance a specified sum of money to the bearer. The docume...

Social Credit, economic plan in Canada, based on the theories of Clifford Hugh Douglas. The central idea is that the problems fundamental to economic depression are those of unequal distributi...

Farm Credit Administration (FCA), an independent agency of the executive branch of the federal government that supervises and regulates the Farm Credit System (FCS) for American agriculture. T...

Crédit Mobilier of America, ephemeral construction company, connected with the building of the Union Pacific RR and involved in one of the major financial scandals in American history. Oakes A...

Douglas, Clifford Hugh, 1879–1952, English engineer and social economist, educated at Cambridge. Author of the economic theory of Social Credit, he became (1935) chief reconstruction adviser t...

Aberhart, William, 1878–1943, premier of Alberta, Canada, b. Ontario. He was a schoolteacher and a founder and dean of the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute (opened 1927). About 1932 he became...

Raiffeisen, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1818–88, German leader in the cooperative movement. Between 1845 and 1865 he was mayor of several German towns. After the agricultural crisis of 1846–47 Raiffeis...

Agatharchus, fl. 5th cent. B.C., Greek painter of the Athenian school, b. Samos. He is credited by Vitruvius with important discoveries in application of shading and perspective and was the fi...