This will be the first of weekly briefs – a summary of interesting posts on different economic blogs. Readers are welcome to suggest their favorite economic blogs or send links to interesting posts they have recently read.

1. Art of economic complexity by Tim Harford on his excellent blog (a highlight) and also on NY Times shows us the new way of visualizing the difference between national economies.

2. Lucy Kellaway at Financial Times calls to ban the PowerPoint (you might need to register for free in order to read the article) – the horror!

3. ElectEcon has an interesting piece about why the Fed pumping lots of money into the monetary system didn’t quite work as well as it should have.

4. An interesting post on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative discusses why research higher status than teaching. While I might have some reservations “about” it (e.g. the quality of research output is measured by those same researchers that produce it, thus creating a certain bias, which is not accounted for in comparing teaching and research), it certainly is worthwhile to read.

5. Econbrowser has very interesting material on estimating output gaps. Read it if you are going to work on macro forecasting, or if you are going to work on DSGE models. Or even if you aren’t.

6. Variant Perception discusses mechanisms of a currency breakup  (a particularly interesting subject, given the problems within the Eurozone) and surprisingly finds that it’s not all as bad as it is cracked up to be.