Planet Money

The announcement earlier this week, that Dubai World, a company owned by the government of Dubai, was hoping to delay payment on $26 billion in debt sent stock markets across the world plummeting. Analysts were watching to see if investors would pull out of banks and investment firms with exposure in the Middle East or flee risky markets altogether. By now, fears of Dubai's credit crisis spreading outside the country appear to have abated, but questions about Dubai remain, like, "what in the world were they thinking?" Dr. Christian Koch of the Gulf Research Center, says Dubai has a good economic strategy, but things got too crazy, too quickly. To Jane Meikle, a Canadian who has spent the last four years living in Dubai, sure the place went a little crazy, but that's part of what makes it so great. She talks about the upside of life in a gulf state boom town, where everyone is from somewhere else.

Economists see climate change as a tragedy of the commons problem. We benefit by putting carbon into the atmosphere because it means cheap electricity and cheap gasoline. In the short term, we save money but eventually if we continue, we'll all suffer. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom says the answer to fixing rising temperatures has to come from the people not the government. But reducing our carbon emissions is expensive and some economists wonder if we're willing to pay for it. To answer that question, German zoologist, Manfred Milinski come up with a game that tests how much we would be willing to pay now to save the Earth later. Joined by a special group of NPR staff, the Planet Money team plays his game and get a surprising result.

Economist Joel Waldfogel says giving gifts people don't want isn't just bad for the recipients, it's bad for the economy. According to his research, billions of dollars are wasted each year because of holiday shopping. A professor at Wharton, he has spent years surveying his students about how much items they received as gifts cost and how much they would pay for the same items. Based on those surveys, Waldfogel says the spending others do for us produces about 20 percent less satisfaction than the spending we do for ourselves. Despite the title of his book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents For The Holidays, Waldfogel says he doesn't want to end giving gift, in fact he enjoys it. He says he just wants us to think harder about who we are buying for and maybe choose a gift card over that reindeer sweater.

Nuhu Ribadu spent years fighting corruption in Nigeria. From his early days in the Nigerian police force to his later years as Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ribadu battled the corruption that strangled his country's economic growth. He had some success for a while, but after two attempts on his life, he was forced to leave his home country and come to the United States. He shares the stories of his struggle and says he hasn't given up yet.

We continue our search for answers about why MRI prices can differ so greatly. This time we travel from New Haven, Conn. to Japan, where an MRI costs only $160. Why? Well, it's because of the government, the quality of the machines and as we'll hear from neurologist Dr. Michiko Kimura Bruno, because Japanese people really love MRIs.

NPR business correspondent Frank Langfitt headed to China a few weeks ago expecting to find a triumphant people. The Chinese economy has recovered much more quickly than many parts of the world and Langfitt says he thought people would be gloating. But that just wasn't the case, instead Langfitt found himself being comforted by the Chinese about the strength of the United States. Many people he spoke to said their country still has a long way to go before overtaking the U.S. economy. Part of the reason, factory workers in the southern part of the country have seen layoffs that Langfitt says, just can't be compared to Detroit. Returning to factories he had visited years ago, Langfitt found doors locked and furniture strewn about outside. Why's that? It's simple — Americans have stopped buying.

Last week two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were acquitted on charges of fraud, stemming from the collapse of two funds they managed in 2007. The government alleged the men knowingly misled investors about the health of the funds by lying about how much money they had personally invested in them and how many redemptions they had. The defense argued that comments made by the men in personal emails were just strategy talk. WNYC reporter Lisa Chow covered the case, she joins us to talk about the verdict and what it may mean for future trials.

Jeremy Anwyl, the chief executive of Edmunds.com, defends his company's latest report about the effectiveness of the much-hyped and recently closed Cash for Clunkers program. Edmunds found the program added only 125,000 in sales at a cost of $3.5 billion, or $24,000 per new car. But Austin Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist currently serving as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, doesn't think those numbers are right. His analysis puts the number of Cash for Clunkers sales closer to 450,000.

Economist and Planet Money regular Simon Johnson thinks it's time to break up the big banks. Simon says the current regulations aren't enough to prevent another crisis and we need to do something more drastic. Former head of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker and Mervyn King, head of the British central bank, agree, but that hasn't convinced Martin Baily of the Brookings Institution. Baily, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, is worried about the unintended consequences of bad regulation. He says the risk simply isn't worth it.

When people talk about the current economic crisis they bring up the Great Depression and Japan's lost decade, but the world's history of 'financial folly' spans much larger, through eight centuries and 66 different countries. In their new book, This Time Is Different, economist Ken Rogoff of Harvard, and Carmen Reinhart of University of Maryland, tell the stories of financial crises from medieval currency debasements to the recent subprime mess. Reinhart says our current troubles are nothing new, and what's worse, she predicts we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.

How can one hospital charge $800 for an MRI while the stand alone clinic down the street charges $450? We visit two MRI centers in Pensacola, Florida to find out.

When the government created the Medicare system in 1965, they were so desperate to get doctors into it that they allowed them set their own fees. The fee for service system was good for doctors, who now got paid for giving health care to the poor and elderly, but bad for the government. The crushing weight of doctors fees soon sent government budgets out of control. Ten years later, President Ford thought he had the solution, cap the fees paid to doctors. Unfortunately capping fees just caused another problem, overtreatment. It wasn't until the late 1980's that an economist from Harvard, Professor William Hsiao, finally came up with method to determine competitive prices for doctor's care — the relative value scale. Though this scale is used today, the problem of over paying doctors still exists. Hsiao, says that's because special interests have gotten a hold of his scale distorted it.

The world's governments have given a trillion dollars in aid developing nations since WWII, and yet in some countries, particularly in Africa, the economic situation is just as bad or worse than it's ever been. Columbia economist and former economic adviser to the Bush administration, Glenn Hubbard, says it's time to change the way we give aid to Africa. Hubbard, co-author of The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty, advocates a modern day Marshall plan, which would give money directly to local businesses instead of government.

Economics teacher Heather Hanemann has developed a curriculum based on several of the Planet Money podcasts. We visited her classroom here in Manhattan to see what the kids thought about the show and hear how the financial crisis has played out in their lives.

GMAC is on the way to achieving the special distinction of three federal bailouts. The financial institution has already received $12.5 billion in assistance, for which the government has taken a stake of nearly 35 percent in the company. Columbia economist Charles Calomiris says the GMAC case is a textbook example of the dangers that come with taxpayer bailouts. Calomiris says the government ends up giving money to keep a foundering bank afloat. The bank takes what's known as "resurrection risk," the economic equivalent of football's Hail Mary pass. There's more. Senior Vice President Paul Merski of the Independent Community Bankers of America says that with government backing in place, GMAC is getting an unfair competitive advantage.