Hard up for cash? Roll your own :P [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Feb 8, 2009 - 36 comments

People with a keen strategic sense maintain a well-diversified hoard of coins and painstakingly build alliances with local shopkeepers or bank tellers, conspicuously proffering coins for one purchase or deposit in the hopes of being indulged when they're short of change at some point in the future. Argentina's coinage problem. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Dec 3, 2008 - 19 comments

"There are several factors which determine the value of stone money. The first is the number of human lives that were lost on the journey to bring the stone home..." The giant stone coins of Yap were used for hundreds of years before the island experienced inflation of the most literal kind due to the entrepreneurship of a shipwrecked American fugitive. Today, the Yap islanders are trying to save their currency, as well as their caste system; while an economist at the Federal Reserve considers what Yap says about our money. [last link pdf, some html excerpts here]
posted by blahblahblah on Dec 9, 2006 - 22 comments

The Bitchun Society is now open for all of your Whuffie-market needs. Or cynical mocking, take your pick. Via (of course) BoingBoing. Can a brother get a ping? Confused?
posted by loquacious on Oct 6, 2006 - 58 comments

Will Currency Wars Effect You? Oldman gives a quick run-through of the geopolitics of America's budget deficit, with some likely scenarios for the next 2-5 years.
posted by alms on Nov 18, 2004 - 26 comments

What if oil was traded in euros? "Even more alarming, and completely unreported in the U.S. media, are significant monetary shifts in the reserve funds of foreign governments away from the dollar with movements towards the euro. It appears that the world community ... seems poised to respond with economic retribution if the U.S. government is regarded as an uncontrollable and dangerous superpower." An analysis of the previous link. Apologies to those I
posted by Birichini on Apr 23, 2003 - 25 comments

How geeks can do away with cash and be their own banks. We've been around the topic of alternative economics a few times before on MeFi, but this piece from the reliably clever Shift makes it all clear to me. How you can do it, and why. And it actually suggests that programmers are the best people to manage a new money system. There's even a Bay Area monetary guru to hand. Does this make as much sense to anyone else as it does to me?
posted by theplayethic on Feb 6, 2002 - 6 comments