In his lecture, titled 'A Treacherous Ocean of Money: Finance and Failure across the Interwar Atlantic, 1920-1935', Vanatta will explore how small U.S. rural banks became entangled in Latin American sovereign debt, tracing the complex financial networks before and during the Great Depression.

In the early 1930s, thousands of mostly small, rural banks failed in the United States. When government officials took possession of the failed institutions, seeking to liquidate their assets and repay the banks’ creditors, they found something surprising: large quantities of sovereign debt, particularly from Latin American states and municipalities which borrowed heavily in the interwar years. The paper starts with this puzzle: how did rural American bankers come to own the debt issued to pave streets, build railroads, and supply clean water across Brazil and Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru? In seeking to answer it, the presentation offers a very preliminary sketch of a new project, which will trace the transnational networks linking Latin American governments (bond issuers), British and American investment banks (bond underwriters), U.S. commercial banks and bond houses (bond distributors), and small, rural U.S. banks (the ultimate bondholders), showing how the networks grew and developed before the Great Depression, how they frayed and split during it, and how they eventually reformed—like much of the global economy—under firm U.S. government influence.

Sean H. Vanatta is lecturer in United States economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation (2023–2024). His research examines the political economy of U.S. finance. He is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, forthcoming) and The Banker’s Thumb: A History of Bank Supervision in the United States (with Peter Conti-Brown, Princeton University Press, forthcoming), as well as articles appearing in Business History Review, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, Enterprise & Society, and Review of Social Economy.