Post Carbon Fellow Michael Shuman’s book Local Dollars, Local Sense – one of three books in our Community Resilience Guides series – was reviewed in New Start Magazine.

From the review

The book provides a wealth of examples involving locally based co-ops, not-for-profits, credit unions etc that have had success in exploiting loopholes in the institutional savings and investment infrastructure. There’s a wealth of useful information in the book that’s potentially applicable in the UK.

But $50tn is a lot of money. The market failure Shuman identifies could be reformed, presumably at the expense the politically well-connected Main Street institutions identified as the problem. Given recent US economic history, one wonders whether this type of deregulation is politically palatable.

This isn’t a political book, more a useful primer for local groups looking to circumvent barriers to investment without going down the venture capital or other exploitative routes. It’s full of good practice and case studies. But the issue of accreditation reform in favour of ‘Main Street’ is a political issue, which the book avoids.

Read full review