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Forget precious metals. Precious medals is where it's at. Or medallions. Taxi cab medallions, to be specific. In New York, a couple of taxi medallions recently sold for $1 million. Each. This presented an interesting question for the Planet Money team: what makes these medallions so valuable? Scarcity? The promise of long returns? And are they a good investment? In the most recent Planet Money podcast, David Kestenbaum and Robert Smith discuss the taxicab industry, and "why economists hate it." Take a listen:

The Planet Money team has done some excellent work this year in explaining some of the basics of money--especially in their What is Money? special for This American Life . Today David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein take a look at a relatively new currency: Bitcoin . Bitcoin is a sort of online cash. Daniel Lyons gave a brief description in a June article for Newsweek : What if people could use the Internet to create a new kind of money, one that didn’t involve governments and central banks and could be used anonymously, like cash? That is the idea behind Bitcoin, a virtual currency that has caught the attention of computer geeks, financial speculators, and drug dealers. For the first time, you can buy anything online without giving your credit-card number or bank-account information—leaving no trace at all. Hundreds of merchants accept Bitcoins for things like books, computers, and professional services. The currency trades on a handful of Bitcoin exchanges, where the price of a Bitcoin fluctuates based on demand. Not long ago a single Bitcoin sold for less than a dollar, but in recent months the price climbed to $8, then to $20, then above $30, before falling back to $18, the current level. So is this a currency with a future? With that question in mind, Planet Money gave Bitcoin a try:

Adam Davidson , David Kestenbaum and their colleagues at NPR's Planet Money has been spending a lot of time this year looking into what makes poor countries poor. On Friday's Planet Money podcast, Davidson and Kestenbaum took on the case of India. India is a particularly curious case. While the economy of the world's largest democracy is growing at a rate of 8% (very impressive during this period of global recession and slow recovery), poverty seems inescapable for hundreds of millions there. Take a listen .

The Planet Money folks talked to an efficiency expert today. Normally Matt LeBlanc, who bills himself as a "lean expert," helps companies figure out how to trim wasteful costs. He gives David Kestenbaum and Caitlin Kenney some examples of how his job works, and explains just how much time can be saved by making things more efficient. And it turns out it is very hard for LeBlanc to turn off his efficiency-seeking radar. Take a listen by clicking here .