Barrett Sheridan

This blog has only been live for two days and already we're getting excellent comments from our readers. We want Wealth of Nations to be a conversation, and when you say something smart, we plan to highlight it.I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to my post on the end of Swiss banking secrecy.

We posted a couple times last week on the kerfuffle surrounding remarks by China's central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, that advocated "creat[ing] an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations." To many, this sounded like an attempt to displace the dollar from the top of the currency heap, and a sign of China's growing ambitions.Brad Setser, a macroeconomist at the Council on Foreign Relations, who I quoted in my earlier post, took the weekend to read Zhou's...

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views around the world. Nice Knowing You: The Obama Administration has forced the ouster of Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors.

Pity Hollywood. The credit crunch has killed -- or at least maimed -- one of the favored tropes of spy movies and action thrillers: the secretive Swiss bank.

You probably thought the Jim Cramer vs. Jon Stewart feud was over. And it is, for the most part. But I just stumbled on this video from PBS. It's a clip from an episode of the investigative journalism series Frontline from way back in 1997, and the first couple minutes show Jim Cramer in action as a hedge fund manager.

As an American, I of course love the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. I just took a trip to Costa Rica, and was able to pay for almost everything in greenbacks.

Okay, I get it -- you're busy, you've got kids, a job, a mortgage to (hopefully) pay. You haven't had time to navigate the alphabet soup of the financial crisis -- CDO, LBO, CDS, SIV.

The list of most dangerous professions includes jobs like Bering Strait crab fishermen and Pacific Northwest logger. A new contender: AIG executive. After the collapsing insurance giant, which has accepted $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money, announced it was paying out $165 million in bonuses to top employees -- including many in the Financial Products division, the Mordor-like seat of financial evil -- populist rage crescendoed.

How tracking cell-phone users via GPS could do for the real world what Google did for the virtual world.

Too much lending is bad, right? Maybe in the West—but China has the opposite problem.

To most publishers, it would've been a touch of golden luck: a manuscript about the worst economic crisis in decades, written by a financial insider and finished months before rivals had even a rough draft ready.

What do Wall Street execs have in common with the world's poorest people? Plenty.

Everyone is aware—sometimes gleefully so—that the global recession was made in America. Wall Street served as the beating heart that pumped toxic debts into global circulation and almost wrecked the entire financial system.

Remember "decoupling"? It was the notion that emerging economies had detached themselves from the developed world, and that Asian consumers could make up for falling demand in the rich world.

What happens if Russia's and China's economies and governments lose their footing?

The great irony of the "buy American" clause snaking its way through the U.S. Congress is that it would force Americans to buy steel from factories that, while on U.S. soil, are owned mainly by foreigners.

In the last of our Davos series, we look at why much of the forecasted gloom has yet to come to pass.

Companies have long paid handsomely for reports and expertise on rising trends. Now Google is threatening this lucrative niche.

Five who are changing the face of the Internet.

OPEC, the once mighty oil cartel, is looking increasingly impotent. When prices skyrocketed to $150 a barrel, producers claim-ed they didn't have the spare capacity to pump more oil and bring the cost of crude back to earth.

Some point to Alan Greenspan. But his hands-off approach to the economy originated with Ayn Rand.

Sarah Palin may not have won the election, but she's a fave of Google users.

The conventional wisdom is that 'we all' borrowed too much before the crisis, but that's just not so.

It sounds like economic heresy, but many experts say more free trade won't ease the global crisis.

Seizing the Sirius Star was an audacious raid for Somalia's emboldened pirates.

The International Monetary Fund has roared back from irrelevancy, with a central role in the fight against the global credit contagion. Only poor debtor nations have doubts, because once again, the IMF is urging budget austerity on some borrowers, even as rich nations roll out eyepopping spending plans to fight recession.Already, Hungary and Ukraine have reluctantly tapped the fund for loans totaling $32 billion, in exchange for belt-tightening.

As the U.S. Presidential debates have shown, Barack Obama and John McCain can't agree on much. One rare exception: electronic health records. Obama has proposed spending $50 billion to help doctors and hospitals digitize their files and build patient databases.

It's a number no one questions, but the size of the derivatives market is not as shocking as it looks

The open-source movement worked wonders for software. Can it do the same for diabetes and other illnesses?

The credit crisis has taken many barons of Wall Street (and their $10,000 suits) to the cleaners. Who, though, has suffered the biggest losses? One way to get at that question is to look at leaders of the hardest-hit companies, and how much the value of their in-house shares has fallen from recent peaks.