This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Michael Lerner and Ethan Hill (GOOD.is): The new Nostradamus, October 1, 2009. Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the US Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

• Paul Lim (The New York Times): 10 years later, a much less expensive Dow 10,000, November 14, 2009. Investors may take some comfort now that the Dow Jones industrial average is back above 10,000 after slipping to around 9,700 at the end of October. But the return to 10,000 also serves as a bitter reminder that stocks have gone virtually nowhere, on balance, for more than a decade. Look a bit

How many economic-advice-giving organizations does it take to run a White House?

MarketWatch reports:

President-elect Barack Obama tapped former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to run a new White House advisory board tasked with offering independent advice about how to stage an economic recovery. Obama named the 81-year-old Volcker to head the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board....

The board is modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that gave President Dwight Eisenhower independent opinions on intelligence issues. Austan Goolsbee, another key Obama adviser, will serve as the economic board's staff director and chief economist.

Volcker can be single-handedly credited with ending the great inflation of the 1970s, and has been critical of the unorthodox steps that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has taken to address our current challenges. Although I share some of Volcker's concerns, it is not clear to me what specifically Volcker would propose to do instead.