Richard Vague

Richard Wade Vague is an American businessperson, venture capitalist, and author who served as Secretary of Banking and Securities of Pennsylvania from 2020 until 2023. He has written several books on the history of economics and specifically the economics of debt, including The Paradox of Debt, The Next Economic Disaster, and An Illustrated Business History of the United States, the story of our nation’s business progress. His latest book is The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821, a biography of one of early America's dominant financiers.

Vague currently serves as managing partner of Gabriel Investments, an early-stage venture capital company. He was also cofounder, Chairman and CEO of Energy Plus, an electricity and natural gas supply company operating in states throughout the U.S. that was sold to NRG Energy in 2011, and also co-founder and CEO of two banks—First USA, a consumer-oriented bank which grew to be the largest Visa issuer in the industry and which was sold to Bank One in 1997, and Juniper, a bank that was the fastest growing credit card issuer in its era, which was sold to Barclays PLC in 2004.

Articles by this Author

The Banker Who Helped Fund the Revolution, Spring 2026 | Vol. 71, No. 2

While Robert Morris is remembered as the "financier of the Revolution," his partner and former boss, Thomas Willing, has been lost to history despite his own contributions to early American business and finance.

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Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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