Currie had begun to demonstrate studious habits (like reading late into the night) by the time his family moved to Massachusetts, but he drove automobiles "with his foot on the floor board" for relaxation.

From 1920-1922, Currie attended St. Francis Xavier University before transferring to the London School of Economics to study under Edwin Cannan, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Lyon Bowley, and Harold Laski.

[5] In a January 1932 memorandum on anti-Depression policy, Currie and fellow instructors Harry Dexter White and Paul Theodore Ellsworth urged large fiscal deficits coupled with open market operations to expand bank reserves, as well as the lifting of tariffs and the relief of interallied debts.

[12] Currie was appointed special advisor on economic affairs to the White House in July 1939 and gave counsel on taxation, social security, and the speeding up of peacetime and wartime production plans until the end of the Roosevelt administration.

[14] He recommended that China be added to Lend-Lease upon his return in March, and he was put in charge of this program's administration under the overall direction of President's Roosevelt's chief foreign policy advisor Harry Hopkins.

This paper stressed the role that an air force in China could play in defending Singapore, the Burma Road, and the Philippines against Japanese attack, as well as the potential for strategic bombing of targets in Japan.

[16] Currie returned to Chongqing in July 1942 to try to ease strained relations between Chiang Kai-shek and General Joseph Stilwell, commander of American military forces in China.

[17] He also appears to have been involved in carrying out orders from President Roosevelt to get American intelligence services to return Soviet cryptographic documents and cease decoding operations, so as not to upset a wartime ally.

[18] From 1944–1945, Currie was involved in loan negotiations between the U.S. and its British and Soviet allies and in preparations for the 1944 Bretton Woods conference (staged mainly by Harry White), which led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In early 1945, Currie headed a tripartite (American, British, and French) mission to Bern to persuade the Swiss government to freeze Nazi bank accounts and stop further shipments of German supplies through Switzerland to the Italian front.

Elizabeth Bentley, another Soviet defector, testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in August 1948 and named Currie and Harry Dexter White as part of the Silvermaster spy network.

[24] White died three days later due to a serious heart condition, and he was later confirmed to be a source of Soviet intelligence in Venona intercepts and the notes of NKVD official Gaik Ovakimian.

In December 1952, he returned to the U.S. to testify before a New York grand jury investigating Owen Lattimore's role in the publication of secret State Department documents in Amerasia magazine.

[34][35][36] After a 1953 Colombian coup d'état, Currie took a sabbatical from economic advisory work and devoted himself to raising Holstein cattle on a farm outside Bogotá, where he cultivated the highest-yielding dairy herd in the country for three consecutive years.

In 1972, he established a unique index-linked housing finance system based on "units of constant purchasing power" for both savers and borrowers, which significantly boosted Colombia's growth.