Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the end of Financial Control, with Sean Vanatta

Join us for a talk by UGA alum Sean Vanatta.

Dr. Sean Vanatta is Senior Lecturer in Financial History and Policy (Political & International Studies) at the University of Glasgow. He is also a senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2018. Prior to that, Vanatta earned a Master's and undergraduate degrees at the University of Georgia.

Vanatta writes about and teaches modern American history, with an emphasis on the political economy of finance. He is currently working on several projects, which collectively address the intersection of democracy, finance, and the regulatory state in modern America. 

His first book, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, 2024), reevaluates the rise of finance in the post-World War II United States and, with it, the rise and fall of New Deal economic liberalism. Beginning in the 1950s, the book argues, profit-seeking bankers exploited American federalism to avoid consumer regulations, using credit cards to connect far-flung consumers with volatile, global capital markets, leading to the indebted nation we know today. 

FREE and open to the public. This is an FYO event.