Sean H. Vanatta

How bankers created the modern consumer credit economy and destroyed financial stability in the process "As much as it enriches our scholarship, Vanatta's history should also inspire our policymaking."—Carey Mott, Los Angeles Review of Books American households are awash in expensive credit card debt. But where did all this debt come from? In this history of the rise of postwar...

The strange and contested evolution of the management of banking risk Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance have evolved into an...