Reader's Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada by Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada by Reader's Digest

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 American finance, Sean H. Vanatta shows how bankers created our credit card economy and, with it, the indebted nation we know today.

America's consumer debt machine was not inevitable. In the years after World War I, state and federal regulations ensured that many Americans enjoyed safe banks and inexpensive credit. Bankers, though, grew restless amid restrictive rules that made profits scarce. They experimented with new services and new technologies. They settled on credit cards, and in the 1960s mailed out reams of high-interest plastic to build a debt industry from scratch.

In the 1960s and '70s consumers fought back, using federal and state policy to make credit cards safer and more affordable. But bankers found ways to work around local rules. Beginning in 1980, Citibank and its peers relocated their card plans to South Dakota and Delaware, states with the weakest consumer regulations, creating on-shore financial havens and drawing consumers into an exploitative credit economy over which they had little control. We live in the world these bankers made.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780888500816
ISBN 10	0888500815
Title	Reader's Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada
Author	Reader"S Digest
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	The Reader's digest Association
Year published	1979-01-01
Number of pages	0
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.