On the economy and financial matters

A couple of especially worthwhile pieces on The Agonist lately:

Stirling Newberry has a fantastically insightful and big-picture analysis of this decade’s economic/political landscape in the U.S.
And Numerian posted a detailed analysis of credit markets, what’s going on with them, and what led up to the current troubles.

Both of these articles are long and really ought to be read twice, but it's time well spent.

Also, I came across a great article from the October, 1998 issue of Fortune which gives an overview of how and why Long-Term Capital blew up, and along the way provides a nice description of how many hedge funds work, and also gives some perspective on the current turmoil in the markets. Warren Buffett talks about this same series of events in a speech he gave to some MBA students around that time. The LTCM discussion starts about 13 minutes in, but listen to the whole thing; it’s absolutely fantastic.