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Even stories set in the present day in your own back yard require a certain amount of world-building or at least scene-setting. I remember one of my early attempts at establishing background. It was a little clumsy.
"Giuseppe peered from the shadows of the alley, checking that the street was empty. Should one of Herr Hitler's packs of brown-shirted thugs happen upon him, he was fearful they would mistake his dark Italian complexion and classical Roman nose for one of Berlin's beleaguered Jewish residents.
The city was very different to the free-wheeling place he had moved to as a young man. In order to pay the large costs of World War I, Germany had suspended the convertibility of its currency into gold when that war broke out. Unlike France, which imposed its first income tax to pay for the war, the German Kaiser and Parliament decided without opposition to fund the war entirely by borrowing a decision criticised by financial experts like Hjalmar Schacht even before hyperinflation broke out. The result was that the exchange rate of the Mark against the US dollar fell steadily throughout the war to 8.91 Marks per dollar. The Treaty of Versailles, however, accelerated the decline in the value of the Mark, so that by the end of 1919 more than 47 paper Marks were required to buy one US dollar. It is sometimes argued that Germany had to inflate its currency to pay the war reparations required under the Treaty of Versailles, but this is misleading, because the Reparations Commission required payment to be in gold marks or in foreign currency, not in the rapidly depreciating paper mark."
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