New Books In Public Policy

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press, 2017) Echols offers a narrative and social history of American capitalism in the years of and preceding the Great Depression by focusing not on Wall Street but on Main Street and the men who ran hundreds of small-town building and loan associations across the nation. Situated in Colorado Springs she reconstructs the life of her shrewd and ambitious grandfather Walter Davis, who emerged from virtually nowhere to become a small town finance man running the City Savings Building and Loan Association. He gained and betrayed the trust of hundreds of depositors who invested their life savings to secure the American dream of homeownership and financial security. They found their lives destroyed by an unregulated industry and Davis’s dishonest practices. Shortfall is