Jane Webb D'Arista

Jane Webb D’Arista, a poet and expert in international financial regulation and monetary flows, who has lived in Hadlyme and on Mill Pond Lane in Old Lyme for decades, died early on July 4 in New London at the age of 94.

Jane was a graduate of Barnard College in New York. Returning from Italy where her husband studied on a Fulbright, she served for two decades as a staff economist for the Banking and Commerce Committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, as a principal analyst in the international division of the Congressional Budget Office, and as an instructor of international finance from 1988-1999 at the Boston University School of Law.

She continued to her work as an economist as a Research Associate at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at U Mass, Amherst, and lectured there, at the University of Utah, and at New School University. She was also involved with the Economic Policy Institute and devoted to her colleagues there.

Jane authored numerous books and publications focused on reforming the financial sector, on the history of U.S. monetary policy and financial regulation, and international and domestic monetary systems, including her notable two-volume 1994 work ‘The Evolution of U.S. Finance’. In the past decade, she published a comprehensive economic analysis tracing how changes in financial structure and regulation eroded monetary control and fueled historically high levels of debt leading to the 2008 financial crisis, a publication entitled, ‘All Fall Down: Debt, Deregulation and Financial Crises’ (2019).

Jane was also a gifted poet. She published a collection of her poems as ‘The Overgrown Copse & Other Poems’ and co-authored a book of poetry with artist Sigrid Miller Pollin that explored the intersection of landscapes, nature, art, and poetry. More recently, she authored a memoir of her experiences as an economist, poet, and avid gardener in a work she titled ‘One Among Many: A Memoir.’ She helped organize and often hosted a group of New England-based poets at monthly meetings to discuss poetry and share one another’s work and reveled in a broad community of friends and colleagues culled from her life in Old Lyme, Washington, DC. and Massachusetts.

Jane was predeceased by her husband Robert D’Arista an artist who taught a generation of artists at American University in Washington DC and then at Boston University. She leaves her children Carla D’Arista of Old Lyme; her sons Peter and Thomas D’Arista, also part-time residents of Old Lyme; her daughter Toni D’Arista, and her brother Hank Webb.

A memorial service is planned for early Fall in Old Lyme.