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In the wake of the financial crisis, investors are faced with a stark choice: entrust their hard–earned dollars to the Wall Street casino, or settle for anemic interest rates on savings, bonds, and CDs. Meanwhile, small businesses are being starved for the credit and capital they need to grow. There′s got to be a better way.
In Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It, Amy Cortese takes us inside the local investing movement, where solutions to some of the nation′s most pressing problems are taking shape. The idea is that, by investing in local businesses, rather than faceless conglomerates, investors can earn profits while building healthy, self–reliant communities.
- Introduces you to the ideas and pioneers behind the local investing movement
- Profiles the people and communities who are putting their money to work in their own backyards and taking control of their destinies
- Explores innovative investment strategies, from community capital and crowdfunding to local stock exchanges
With confidence in Wall Street and the government badly shaken, Americans are looking for alternatives. Local investing offers a way to rebuild our nest eggs, communities, and, just perhaps, our country.
From the Inside Flap
So why are we starving these vital enterprises?
The truth is, our financial and political system is stacked against small business. The stock market has become a vast, electronic casino that has abandoned any pretense of allocating capital to productive use. And community banks—a mainstay of small business funding—are an endangered species in a Too Big to Fail world. Don′t look to the government for help, though: politicians at the federal, state, and local levels are often under the sway of deep–pocketed corporations. Meanwhile, Main Streets and downtowns everywhere are slowly dying.
But don′t write them off just yet. In dozens of towns and cities across the country, an extraordinary experiment in citizen finance is underway. From Brooklyn, New York to Vernon County, Wisconsin to Port Townsend, Washington, residents are banding together to save their small businesses and Main Streets from extinction. And they are reaping rich rewards in the process. These citizens are at the vanguard of a grassroots revolution that journalist Amy Cortese calls "locavesting."
In Locavesting, you′ll meet these pioneers and explore the often ingenious ways—some new, some as old as capitalism itself—they′ve come up with to take back their financial destinies from Wall Street and the corporate fat cats while revitalizing the communities they call home. Among other examples, you′ll learn how:
Nine cops in Clare, Michigan saved a 111–year–old bakery and helped revive their downtown
As union protests engulfed the state capital, a new breed of cooperatives in rural Wisconsin pointed the way toward a more harmonious and prosperous way of doing business
"Crowdfunding" startups such as ProFounder, Funding Circle, and Grow VC are harnessing the Internet and social media to connect entrepreneurs with hundreds of small investors
A grassroots organization called Slow Money is mobilizing thousands of citizens to create new funding models for financing local food and agriculture
Companies from Ben & Jerry′s to Annie′s Homegrown have sold shares directly to loyal customers, bypassing Wall Street middlemen
And how communities as varied as Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the Hawaiian islands are working to bring back local stock exchanges
Forget credit default swaps and derivatives. This is the kind of financial innovation we desperately need. A source of inspiration and ideas with practical how–to advice, Locavesting is must–reading for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and investors looking for solid, socially productive alternatives to the Wall Street casino—and anyone who cares about the future of democracy in America.
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Modern finance helps you invest in offshore drilling rigs 10,000 miles away within a matter of seconds but makes it nearly impossible to keep your favorite dive bar or local bakery from being shut down because they can't get the simplest of loans. It greases the wheels to turn your dollars into another Starbucks, but will stand in your way in keeping the corner coffee shop open. It strangles small businesses in their infancy and channels the world's financial resources towards the biggest and most well-connected companies. This senseless perversion of finance is the same reason that the recession shuttered independent store fronts across the country, while their chain-store counterparts never closed and even expanded into the very same empty storefronts, never to close. This fundamental misalignment is addressed head-on by Locavesting, which confronts Big Finance directly, with art and an intelligence that comprehends the big picture of modern finance (and its distortions), and opens the door to the solution: local investment, an option that provides a host of solutions, all ripe for the picking.
By way of background, I worked as a financial professional drafting and polishing financial disclosures for Fortune 500 companies and dabbling in the superstructure of Big Finance and feel like I have a good grounding in the world of finance. To that end, Cortese has clearly done her homework and has synthesized her deep understanding of the financial system to skillfully highlight the pressure points in the system, the bottlenecks preventing a more productive financial system and has clearly put her faculties to work in diagnosing the illness and prescribing the treatment. Yes, there are piles of brilliant books that tell you what went wrong with our financial system and what we should have done - but Locavesting tells us the way forward.
Even her unadorned statistics make for powerful arguments:
- Every dollar spent at a locally-owned business generates three times more direct, local economic activity than a dollar spent at a corporate-owned peer.
- Small businesses make up 99% of all U.S. companies, employ half of all private sector employees and contribute half of private GDP, yet of the $26 trillion held in public securities, not a penny goes to local business.
- Of all of the money that flows through our stock markets, 1 percent goes to productive use and the other 99 percent is trading and speculation.
We recognize that buying products is a vote -- whether commodity corn or sweatshop sneakers. We should equally recognize that an investment dollar is also a vote -- whether it goes to big box retailers and feedlots or your community bookstore and butcher. It is astounding that local finance, such a simple concept, has been so lost in the financial casino that its re-introduction feels like a revolution. We want our food to be local, we buy local to support our communities, we wax nostalgic about the un-defining of our distinctive communities, yet we still funnel all of our money into the hands of a few financial institutions (who, incidentally, recently threw themselves into chaos, took a buzzsaw to our economy and promptly continued on their merry way). Locavesting is a powerful call to re-imagine the meaning of investment and to reconsider what it means to invest -- that a thriving community and the preservation of local identity and independence can itself be a return on investment.
If you know nothing about finance or are a steely-eyed vet of the financial services industry, I would suggest that you take the time to consider the revolutionary (and ironically historical) option of investing locally, where you live. We all have to make choices and Locavesting is an indispensable tool to begin thinking about how to make those choices.
The author wears her learning lightly, especially in explaining the complicated history of how laws originally intended to protect investors, have shut off the small businessman from most sources of affordable capital.
It's a practical book too, describing exactly how to walk the talk of investing locally. The author is straightforward about the risks (surprisingly low) and rewards (surprisingly good - both financially and emotionally).
I learned a lot and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
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