Some mentally stimulating posts I've read this weekend:

"A Tale of Two Crisis - Japan vs. Korea" - As this post mentions (and I've mentioned before), economics is almost a psuedo-science because of the unreliability of models at a macro level ... but this an interesting read comparing the Japanese and Korean financial crisis, and the implications of both approaches.

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"Argentina: The superpower that never was" - "A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world. The millions of emigrant ­Italians and Irish fleeing poverty at the end of the 19th century were torn between the two: Buenos Aires or New York? The pampas or the prairie?"

An interesting look at what could have been - take a peek at how two young republics evolved to two completely divergent nations.

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Curious at the story behind payday loan companies?

Once caught in the cycle, the borrower faces a choice each payday—pay Check Into Cash $30 or pay Check Into Cash $230. Unlike conventional loans, in which the creditor issues the debtor a lump sum to be repaid with interest in installments over time, the largest single transfer in a payday loan goes from debtor to creditor. With payday lending, the “debt trap” is not a figure of speech: the loan is actually structured as a trap.