This Week's Carnival Of The Capitalists

This week's COTC is up at Drakeview. It's the 104th COTC, and there are lots of good pieces this week. As usual, here are my picks.

There's been a lot of talk about inflation lately. The Watchful Investor, Jim Waddell answers investors concerns in What is inflation?. His post covers a lot of other ground, too, like money, gold standard, democracy, price and Subarus.

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog discusses governments and markets in Water: The Only Market the Government Screws Up Worse than Oil.

Joseph Weisenthal at The Stalwart, examines recent IPO activity in Metcalfe's Law, Reed's Law Revisited; Question New Valuation Models.

We just discussed EVA (Economic Value Added) in my Advanced Corporate Finance class. Here's an application -- Frank Scavo suggests that CIOs start Using Economic Value Added (EVA) to justify IT investments.

Moneywise covers investing at The Real Returns with some yield information for various investment classes in Reverse Valuations of Stocks and Bonds.

David Foster of Photon Courier has a nice piece on the relations between bond prices and interest rates in The Bare Bond Basics.

Brian at Financial Reference talks about Superfund, a new hedge fund being marketed to middle income investors in 2 and 20. Maybe it's just me, but I'd be leery of naming an investment after a toxic waste cleanup program...

Phil Town at Rule #1 Blog: Phil Town on Investing writes Why Speculation is a Bad Idea. I think the title says enough. Read it.

Sandeep Srinivasa at Datum writes on prediction markets in Prediction markets: real life psychohistory?

Finally, since a week doesn't go by at Financial Rounds without taking a shot at Sarbanes-Oxley, we have Barbara of Trying to Catch Up. She writes Sarbanes-Oxley Sucks (Really),. It's all about the bureaucracy.

Like I said, there are a lot this week. These are only a smattering of the pieces, but they're the ones that caught my eye.