Starbucks: harbinger of financial doom?

Slate's Daniel Gross may be making a bid to unseat the Times's Thomas Friedman as journalism's go-to coiner of clever-cute geopolitical theories. Try this one on for size: The more Starbucks franchises a country has, Gross wrote this week, "the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses."

Not only did Starbucks "follow new housing developments into the suburbs and exurbs," making those places appear all the more valuable -- thereby contributing to the bubble -- they were also often the very spots where dubious mortgage deals were signed. Starbucks, too, "carpet bombed" financial capitals, Gross suggested, and displayed a tendency to locate its stores on the ground floors of buildings with investment banks; the caffeine "enabled deal jockeys to stay up all hours," during which time they came up with ever-more-creative ways to disguise risk.

The hard numbers: New York, center of the credit bust, has nearly 200 Starbucks franchises; London, "the wellspring of many toxic [financial] innovations," sports 256; South Korea, now facing its own bank bailout, has 253. "Crazy Dubai" has 48 (serving a population of a mere 1.7 million).

Meanwhile, the relatively unscathed Central America, the strained-but-not-broken South America, and Italy (no big problems) are all -- coincidentally? -- places where Starbucks has yet to gain much of a purchase.

There's more than a touch of Daniel Bell ("The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism") in Gross's theory, because Gross interprets flocking to Starbucks as a sign that a given society is primed to abandon traditional mores in favor of the flashy and new. These time-honored mores might include the frequenting of mom and pop greasy-spoon cafes, leisurely afternoons at independent coffee joints -- or (let's just throw this one out there) mortgage rules demanding 20-percent down payments.