EVE Online - No Credit Crunch here

Jim Rossignol continues his articles on EVE over at Eurogamer, giving some insite into the pure capitalist ecconomy that has developed in the MMO.

There's even the potential for "passive" income in EVE, where your investment in time to skills can pay off. The most basic of these is in the datacores which fund invention. These are made by NPC characters with whom you can set up a research contract. Your skills combined with their rating dictates how many cores they will produce. With enough agents (and enough alts farming those agents) you can make a small income without having to do anything other than pick up the cores and sell them every few months. With datacores being constantly used by the inventors, it's a pretty stable investment.

Better yet, although slightly more risky, is moon mining. Generally the best moons are found in 0.0 space, so you're likely to need some kind of foothold outside of Empire to be able to do this safely. However, the best moons make millions of isk per hour, and the "high ends" have a yield that results in immense territory wars. You don't have to go for these ones, of course, and there are plenty of lesser moons that, when combined with other products, produce components for the invention market. Once it's set up, all you'll have to do is to refuel the moon mining structure, and to empty the silo once a week. Free money.