Curious Cat Investing and Economics Carnival #2

Welcome to the second edition of our investing and economics carnival.

• How Does the Current Crisis Compare to the Great Depression? by Price Fishback - “How does this compare to the Great Depression? We won’t know the final outcome of this recession for a while, but I can safely say that the current situation is nowhere near as bad as the situation during the 1930’s.”
• US GDP and imports by Matt Nolan - “Now, this doesn’t actually make sense as a measure to look at. Why? Well when we measure GDP we are interested in ‘domestic production’…”
• 100th Entrepreneur Loan by John Hunter - “Participating with Kiva is a great antidote to reading about the unethical ‘leaders’ taking huge sums to run their companies into the ground (or even just taking obscene sums to maintain their company). The opportunity to give real capitalists an chance at a better life is wonderful.”
• The Best 15 Financial iPhone Apps by David Weliver - “More than a dozen great financial apps for the iPhone make tracking and managing your personal finances on the go as easy as texting. Want to enlist your iPhone to help you get richer?”
• Bolster Your Emergency Fund In A Prolonged Crisis - “To prepare for the worst, we should picture an unemployed scenario and get serious about bulking up our emergency fund to meet at least six to eight months of expenses.”
• How to make money without a job and why you should - “There are two more advantages to alternative income besides diversification of income sources. First of all is the expansion of skills… You are learning something new, and making it that much more likely that you’ll be able to add further income streams…
• Five Low-Risk Stocks For Gen Y - “There are much better alternatives for the ultra-conservative Gen Y investors than money market accounts, Treasuries and CDs. A conservative strategy focusing on high quality, low risk dividend stocks should significantly out-perform the above investments, with very little incremental long-term risk.”
• 5 easy ways to save money and the environment - “Bottled water is a huge drain on our resources and are grossly overpriced. Reusable water bottles use fewer resources, save you money… Compact fluorescent light bulbs use 25% of the energy of standard incandescent bulbs and usually last 5 years or more…”
• Text Messaging is the Biggest Scam of the 21st Century - “The cost per GB of cable internet is $0.75… the cost per GB of cell phone data $6.00… the cost per GB of text messaging data is $800…”

I decided to add this investing and economics carnival after running the Curious Cat Management Management Improvement Carnival for several years. If you like these posts you may also be interested in the Invest Reddit where a community of those interested in investing submit and rate articles and blog posts.