Tip o’ the hat to Laura at EconomyStory for sending us Sub-prime the Musical. The site consists of a series of podcasts by a college student named Madison Koshy, who created them from research she did on the causes of the credit crisis. Naturally, she then wrote song parodies to illustrate the concepts she had [...]

Some of you have no doubt seen the “Fear the Boom and Bust” video featuring the rap stylings of economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, two economists with diametrically opposed viewpoints. To put the dispute in its most simplistic terms, Keynes thought government intervention was the only way out of economic downturns, and Hayek…not so much. (Think Paul Krugman vs. Ron Paul to get a picture of two contemporary acolytes of these schools of thought.)

In Wikipedia’s entry on Keynes, the section “Economics: out of favour 1979–2007” is followed by Economics: the Keynesian resurgence of 2008–2009.

There are more than 5,000 empty, foreclosed residential buildings all around Chicago right now. The city has $55 million with which to buy, rehab, sell or rent out vacant, foreclosed homes. So now the city has to decide which ones make sense to buy. Doing that means traipsing through vacant, smelly, potentially dangerous, boarded up homes and calculating how much repairs will cost. The non-profit housing developer Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago is doing that work for the city and WBEZ’s Ashley Gross follows along, pries back the boards, and gives us all a peak inside.

There are more than 150 cash strapped communities throughout the US that are making their own money. I mean that literally, they are printing their own currency to be used locally. The bad news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. The good news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. And surprisingly, this is not illegal. It’s all in an effort to keep money circulating exclusively in the local economy when the federal currency is too busy being locked up in a bank vault. WAMU’s Rebecca Sheir has the story.