Final Thoughts on Shortfall: What We Forgot About American Banking

So that’s Shortfall. A book about a family scandal that turned into something much bigger.

Let me give you my honest take.

What sticks with you

The thing I keep coming back to is how thoroughly this story got buried. The building and loan collapse during the Depression affected millions of Americans. One in ten had money in a B&L when the stock market crashed. In Colorado alone, 60 percent of all associations closed. And somehow we forgot about all of it.

We remember the stock market crash. We remember the bread lines. We remember the Dust Bowl. But the building and loan disaster? That got replaced in our cultural memory by a Frank Capra movie about a fictional banker who was too good to be true.

And that’s not an accident. Echols shows how the thrift industry’s trade group actively worked to bury this history. They planted positive stories. They lobbied Congress. They rebranded as “savings and loans.” And then It’s a Wonderful Life came along and did the rest.

The big takeaways

A few things from this book that I think matter beyond the Depression era:

Main Street can be just as corrupt as Wall Street. We tend to think of small-town businesses as inherently more honest than big-city finance. Echols blows that up completely. The B&L men in Colorado Springs were neighbors, church members, Sunday school teachers. They were also embezzlers, forgers, and con artists. Smallness doesn’t equal virtue.

Homeownership isn’t always a path to security. This is still a hard sell for most Americans. But the history is pretty clear. For working-class people buying homes through building and loans, the system was often stacked against them. Balloon mortgages, forfeiture clauses, inflated interest rates. The American dream of owning your home could be a trap, and it has been a trap repeatedly throughout our history.

We keep forgetting financial disasters. The building and loan collapse. The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Each time, similar patterns show up: deregulation, risky lending, inflated promises, ordinary people losing their savings. And each time, we seem to start from scratch as if none of it ever happened before.

Conservatism has deeper roots than we think. Echols makes a compelling case that the rightward shift of white working-class Americans didn’t start in the 1960s or 1980s. In Colorado Springs, even during the worst of the Depression, many residents resisted New Deal reform and clung to ideas about free enterprise and individual responsibility. That’s a story with a lot of relevance today.

What the book does well

Echols pulls off something difficult here. She braids together three very different kinds of stories: a personal family history, a community study of Colorado Springs, and a broader financial history of the B&L industry. The personal stuff keeps it human. The community details make it vivid. And the financial history gives it weight.

The research is impressive. She worked from her grandfather’s FBI file, family diaries, subpoenaed telegrams, newspaper archives, and conversations with her aging mother. The fact that the key archive was sitting in cardboard boxes in her family’s attic for decades is almost too good.

Where it’s less strong

If I’m being honest, the book can be dense in places. There are stretches where the financial and political history piles up and the narrative thread gets thin. Some readers might find themselves wanting to get back to the family story when Echols is deep in the weeds of Colorado politics or the mechanics of B&L regulation.

And the book focuses heavily on Colorado Springs, which was in many ways unusual. Echols acknowledges this, but I found myself wanting more about how the B&L collapse played out in other cities. She mentions California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Missouri in passing, but those stories get just a few paragraphs each.

Who should read this

Anyone interested in American financial history. Anyone who thinks the 2008 crisis was unprecedented. Anyone who wants to understand how a whole industry’s collapse can just vanish from public memory.

And honestly, anyone who watches It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas and finds it heartwarming. This book is the cold water that comes after. The reality behind the fairy tale.

Shortfall isn’t a fun read. But it’s an important one. And the personal stakes make it something more than just another financial history. When the author is writing about her own grandfather, her own family’s secrets, her own life shaped by stolen money, it hits different.

Book Details:

• Title: Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking
• Author: Alice Echols
• Publisher: The New Press, 2017
• ISBN: 978-1-62097-304-2

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