This Week's Carnival Of The Capitalists

This week's COTC is up at Willisms. This week's group of posts has a lot of interesting finance/econ related material. My picks of the week are:

Ironman at Political Calculations blog presents Financial Markets in a Catastrophe. He has some interesting theories about why markets went up slightly during the week of the storm.

Barry L. Ritholtz at The Big Picture presents Gas Futures -- but not retail prices -- Returns to Pre-Katrina Levels. His short explanation - it's your (the consumer's) fault.

THC at The Happy Capitalist presents Widgets and free credit reports. It's a good reminder - check your credit report regularly.

James Hamilton at Econbrowser has a nice piece on Who cares about core inflation?

Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade presents Lender Discrimination and Shopping for a Home Loan. The article he bases his piece on has gotten a lot of credit. He gets one point right - credit scores differ a lot between people with the same income levels, and the study didn't correct for credit scores.

Brian at Financial Reference talks about how Dividends affect investment strategy.

Mike Landfair at Mover Mike talks at length on What's Wrong with Fiat Money? It looks like he's already getting some lively comments.

As usual, look around. You and I probably have different tastes, so there's also other things you might enjoy that didn't quite do it for me.