In Brief

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A few pointers to what I'm reading around the Internet today.

Monetary Policy Explained With Animated Gifs (Rortybomb) Mike Konczal has really outdone himself with this epic post.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Interest on Excess Reserves (FT Alphaville): I spent several hours yesterday preparing to write about why eliminating the interest the Fed pays banks on their excess reserves was a bad idea. Then Cardiff Garcia of FT Alphaville weighed in with his magnum opus on the subject and instantly rendered everything else irrelevant.

Shorter version: cutting IOER will likely destabilize money market funds, and therefore the entire financial system. And it won't really do much to stimulate lending or economic activity.

The case against patents (St. Louis Fed): Patents don't actually encourage innovation. They should probably be abolished.

The ECB plan will fail because it fails to address the problem (Bill Mitchell) Growth is the only solution to Europe's problems.

Can we have a TARP for jobs? (Felix Salmon) Answer: not likely. But only because our politicians think debt is worse than unemployment.

Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance (Naked Capitalism) A new paper attempts to describe modern banking as a form of rent seeking.

- compiled by CNBC.com senior editor John Carney

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