1. Prime Minister Rudd's article on the causes of the current recession was widely-read in Australia. However around the same time a well-written article by Dr Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Economics Nobel Prize, was published in the New York Review of Books. Dr Sen's article is nicely written in a historical context and provides an interesting perspective as to the type of capitalism that may emerge from the recession http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22490

2. This week laid bare the political differences that seem likely to delay Australia's carbon trading scheme. A recent article by John Broder in the New York Times provides an absorbing history of such schemes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17cap.html

3. Considering practical, rather than philosophical, causes Dr Doug Diamond and Dr Anil Kashyap, of the University of Chicago, provided some interesting reasons for the collapse of the American banking system in the days immediately after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Although their predictions are a little dated, their explanations for the collapse are well-worth reading http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-...