Death Announced of Jane Webb D’Arista, Economist and Poet Formerly of Lyme and Old Lyme

Jane Webb D’Arista, a poet and an expert in international financial regulation and monetary flows, who lived in Hadlyme and on Old 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 her work as an economist as a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lectured there, at the University of Utah and at The New School. She was also involved with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. and devoted to her colleagues there.

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

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, D.C. and Massachusetts.

Jane was predeceased by her husband Robert D’Arista, who taught a generation of artists as a professor of painting at American University in Washington, D.C. 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.