The Bretton Woods system of managed currencies unraveled in the early 1970s, leaving a decade of economic trouble in its wake. In recent years there’s been a lot of talk of Bretton Woods II, the informal setup in which emerging market countries link their currencies to the dollar. That arrangement is of course under a lot of pressure. …

The historic first meeting of Basil (the big fat one) and Sage. Which was the major event in the Curious Capitalist household over the holiday weekend.

Steve Schwarzman’s argument (as filtered by Andrew Sorkin) that the world would be a better place if banks didn’t have to report the current market values of all that toxic junk in their portfolios has become the wonky business blogger topic of the week, inspiring posts from Felix Salmon, Barry Ritholtz, Roger Ehrenberg, Yves Smith, Tom …

I wrote a piece for Time.com about the decision at Starbucks to shutter 600 stores. You can read it here. It’s brilliant and all, but the real reason I’m blogging is so that I can pass along this text my friend Richard sent me over the weekend:

Starbucks is toast—waiting in line for the bathroom at the brighton beach location—two

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As America’s Leading Source of News About the Danish Economy^TM, the Curious Capitalist is legally required to report this important information released Monday by the University of Michigan’s World Values Survey:

The results indicate that Denmark is the happiest nation in the world and Zimbabwe the unhappiest. The United States ranks

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How can you be for free trade yet against (or at least worried about) globalization? Ralph E. Gomory and William Baumol would like to tell you:

On what grounds can we, as free trade advocates, assert that globalization can harm the country? A straightforward explanation suffices: In standard analyses of trade, economists usually assign

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I belatedly got around to finishing Connie Bruck’s epic and much-discussed profile of Sheldon Adelson Monday night. It is, like most of Bruck’s work, loaded with an almost-but-not-quite-numbing amount of detail. But the essential points are these:

1) Sheldon Adelson is the third richest man in the U.S.
2) These riches flow from his …

I had nothing to do with instructional-video site Howcast making it onto TIME.com’s list of the 50 Best Websites of 2008. But I do know the company’s CEO, Jason Liebman. I met him last year when he was still working at Google, trying to sell professional videomakers on the merits of YouTube.

This was at a time when Chris Anderson’s …

In response to what I wrote about gentrification not driving low-income minorities from their neighborhoods, the reader tegwar raises a very good point: What exactly do we mean by “gentrification?” He writes:

I’m a touch underwhelmed on first glance. They define gentrifying neighborhoods as those which were in the bottom quintile by

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So my column about John Mackey, Kip Tindell, and their ideas about what Mackey calls “conscious capitalism” turns out to have been moderately timely after all. Yesterday Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke threw open the doors to a group blog that they and a few economists and journalists have been filling with posts for the past week. The …