Balancing the public and private in US banks regulation with Sean Vanatta

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 has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management. In Private Finance, Public Power, Sean, writing with Peter Conti-Brown, offer a new history of finance and public policy in the United States by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide. Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Sean will describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.

Sean H. Vanatta is senior lecturer in financial history and policy at the University of Glasgow. His research examines the political economy of finance in the United States, uncovering the coevolution of financial politics, policies, and business strategies that produced the modern financial system. He is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control and Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown.