A worker from Hope House, an organization that sponsors the use of cryptocurrencies on El Zonte beach, makes a purchase at a small shop that accepts bitcoins, in Tamanique, El Salvador, June 9, 2021.
(AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)
The metaverse offers novel opportunities for retailers and their customers, but retailers need to be adequately prepared to overcome the challenges of new technology.
Until the late 1800s, moments of widespread high-risk financial gambling weren’t considered manias but the results of individual actors, who bore responsibility for the disastrous results.
NFTs can be used to prove who created and who owns digital items like these images by the artist Beeple shown at an exhibition in Beijing.
Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images
NFTs are made the same way as crypto coins, but where every crypto coin is like every other, each NFT is a unique digital item – from images to sound files to text.
GameStop logo is seen at one of their stores in Athens, Ohio.
Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
It’s up to the courts to draw a line between free speech and illegal market manipulation. And the Supreme Court has never ruled on this specific question.
Rosewood, the name for several endangered tree species that make beautiful furniture, being loaded in Madagascar.
Pierre-Yves Babelon/Shutterstock
For decades nations have worked to curb international sales of endangered plants and animals. But in countries like China, with high demand and speculative investors, that strategy fuels bidding wars.
Water markets are essential for many farmers to keep their crops alive.
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The market for water entitlements is worth tens of billions, encouraging investors to raise funds and get involved. But the data shows they aren’t having a big impact on prices.
Trading floors like this one – at the old American Stock Exchange in the 1980s – are at the heart of capitalism and financial speculation.
David Foster/Flickr via CC BY-ND
The word “speculation” carries a connotation of negativity. And it’s probably fair to say that pretty much every financial crisis since the tulip mania of the 1630s can be attributed to some sort of mass…
“Mister Thorn once cornered corn and that ain’t hay” sang Ella Fitzgerald, in the year that two speculators cornered the market for onions in Chicago. It was 1956, and Sam Siegel, a Chicago trader, and…