Understanding the Economy

Due to economic interestingness and the early stages of my personal investment, I've been reading up on the fundamentals of our economic system. Here are some of the best bits I've found:

• A brief essay by peristaltor that discusses the credit crunch in the context of how money is created.
• The Crash Course, a comprehensive but concise look at the problems we're facing currently (3 hrs., broken up into bite-size chapters). I highly recommend this one.
• This essay, which asks the most important economic question of our time: What happens to an inherently inflationary economy when it hits hard physical limits to growth?
• Aside from the Ponzi scheme, the other financial scheme you need to understand for analogy purposes is the Martingale.