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On today's show: Four genius ideas.

These ideas, as it happens, have all appeared in Planet Money radio stories. But they've never been on the podcast.

For More, see our original posts for each story:

• A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan.
• Rethinking The Oreo For Chinese Consumers
• What Do The Dow's Daily Swings Mean? Not Much.
• How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Kanye West's "Champion." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

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Central bank nerds have a new way to express their love: #FedValentines. Economist Justin Wolfers started the hashtag on Twitter this morning; lovelorn monetary policy watchers immediately went wild.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Twitter

And here are some of our own contributions:

* I'll be your lover of last resort.

* But, soft! What light through yonder discount window breaks? It is the east, and Ben is the sun.

* You had me at QE1.

(Alas, we weren't the first to come up with that last one; turns out, @i8dc beat us to it.)

The NYT's Economix the WSJ's Real Time Economics also posted their favorites, as did Wolfers.

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Nobody lives forever.

The nation's big banks are writing death plans — living wills that spell out how, in a future crisis, they could be safely dismantled. The idea is that the death plans will help avoid another government bailout of the banks.

"You're technically writing your own funeral, down to the color of the flowers" says Dolores Atallo.

Atallo is part of the living wills team at the consulting firm Deloitte. She shows up to our interview wearing all black, and jokes that she moonlights as an undertaker.

"The regulators are your funeral directors," she says. "They tell you how you're going to be unwound and then they stand over there and say, 'I'm very sorry for your loss.' "

Each bank is now responsible for proving — in detail — that in a crisis situation it could fail without bringing down the financial system. In the case of giant banks, this is ridiculously complicated.

Via Reuters:

Iran is turning to barter - offering gold bullion in overseas vaults or tankerloads of oil - in return for food as new financial sanctions have hurt its ability to import basic staples for its 74 million people, commodities traders said Thursday. ...

New sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union to punish Iran for its nuclear program do not bar firms from selling Iran food but they make it difficult to carry out the international financial transactions needed to pay for it.

For More: Listen to our recent podcast, "Do Sanctions Work?"

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More to come.

That big, $25 billion mortgage settlement that we've been hearing about forever is finally done. The deal involves five big banks and grew out of the robo-signing scandal, where bank employees signed off on thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them.

The biggest chunk of the settlement will go toward reducing what underwater borrowers owe on their mortgages. (To be underwater on your mortgage is to owe more than your home is worth).

The settlement will help an estimated 1 million homeowners. But 11 million homeowners are underwater. And while many of those people will continue to pay their mortgage, others are likely to go into foreclosure.

In fact, the foreclosure process slowed significantly last year, as negotiations over the settlement dragged on and banks waited for the details to become clear. Now that there's a settlement in place, the rate of foreclosures is likely to pick up.

Enlarge Mario Tama/Getty Images

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Turn on the news on any given day, and you're likely to hear about the Dow Jones industrial average. It is the most frequently checked, and cited, proxy of U.S. economic health. But a lot of people — maybe most — don't even know what it is. It's just the stock prices of 30 big companies, summed up and roughly averaged. That's it.

And what does the daily movement of this number have to do with the lives of most Americans? Not much.

An update and a warning:

Update: An archive of Planet Money podcasts going all the way back to June of '09 is now available on iTunes. Enjoy!

Warning: If your iTunes is set to "download all" for the Planet Money podcast, you may suddenly find you are downloading 301 Planet Money podcasts. Beware!

To check this setting, go to your podcasts in iTunes, and click the "settings" button at the bottom of the page. Make sure you're set to "Download the most recent one."

Here's a screen grab:

Enlarge .

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Thanks, and sorry for any inconvenience.

Enlarge Mario Tama/Getty Images

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Below is an excerpt from Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, "Why Do We Still Care About the Dow?" Read all of Davidson's Times Magazine columns here.

Why do we still care so much about the Dow? It remains not only a rough measure of stock performance but also the most frequently checked, and cited, proxy of U.S. economic health...

The Dow average, drawn out to two decimal places, may seem like some perfectly scientific number, but it's far from it. A small committee selects 30 big companies — I.B.M., G.E., McDonald's, Disney and so forth — and then adds up the price of their stocks. Then the analysts divide it by the Dow Divisor, a misleadingly precise-seeming number formulated to account for things like dividends and splits that right now is, well, about 0.132129493. The resulting figure is repeated throughout the country...

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Can we have a banking system that provides good services to people at reasonable rates? A banking system that doesn't bring down the global economy every few decades?

Anat Admati thinks we can. She's a finance professor at Stanford, but she never paid much attention to banks until the financial crisis. (This is not unusual in the superspecialized world of academia.)

After the crisis hit, Admati started reading up on banks. And, in a basic banking textbook, she came upon a single line that changed her career.

"I sat in my office and I thought, 'Something is really wrong in banking.' "

On today's show, Admati tells us what she thinks is wrong in banking — and how she thinks we can fix it.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart's "Belong." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

Enlarge Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

The economists who predicted the housing crisis tend to be a gloomy bunch, as Adam Davidson notes in his latest Times Magazine column. Dean Baker is the rare exception. In the following guest post, he explains why he has parted ways with the economic pessimists.

For more than five years before the recession began in December of 2007, I was one of the leading economic pessimists, warning of the housing bubble and the damage that its collapse would do to the economy. I based this pessimism on my analysis of the housing market, not a genetic disposition to pessimism. Given the economy's current situation, I find the warnings of the pessimists – the double-dip gang – to be wrongheaded and seriously counterproductive.

First to the economy's near-term prospects: the economy is growing and will in all probability continue to grow. Economies do generally grow. We see new investment, leading to more employment and higher productivity, which leads to higher profits and higher wages.

NPR

Now read 15 more.

A while back, the MIT economist Andrew Lo set out to review a couple books about the financial crisis. Those books led to a couple more books, which led — you see where this is going — to 17 more books.

Now, Lo is about to publish "Reading About The Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review" (PDF).

Reading 21 books about the financial crisis does not sound, on its face, like a fun experience. After you talk to Lo, it sounds even worse.

Enlarge Scott Halleran/Getty Images

Scott Halleran/Getty Images

This is what it's like to host the Super Bowl: For one weekend, your city is the focus of the sporting universe. Fans flock in droves. They eat at your restaurants and sleep in your hotels. They buy the "I ♥ [your city]" t-shirts.

The NFL estimates that hosting the country's premier sporting event will give the local economy a $300-500 million jolt.

Economist Victor Matheson of the College of Holy Cross doesn't buy it.

In today's podcast, co-hosted from Indianapolis by NPR's Mike Pesca, Matheson presents the case against hosting the Super Bowl.

He argues hosting the Super Bowl pushes out the economic activities that occur on normal, non-Super Bowl hosting weekends. No conventions are held. Museums are closed. Local residents do not come downtown simply because it's too crowded.

What's more, Matheson says, the majority of the money that's shelled out by out-of-towners does not even stay in the city. It flows to the big, national hotel companies and restaurant chains.

"More money than average is being spent in hotels and restaurants, but is then immediately leaving town...you have lots of dollars changing hands but it's really money being sucked out of people's hands and disappearing, rather than money that goes to build the local economy or repay a big stadium subsidy."

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Johnny Pearson's "Heavy Action" and Faith Hill's "Waiting For Sunday Night." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

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Old school.

Ron Silver, the owner of Bubby's restaurant in Brooklyn, recently put a word on his menu you don't often see anymore: lard. The white, creamy, processed fat from a pig. And he didn't use the word just once.

For a one-night-only "Lard Exoneration Dinner", Silver served up lard fried potatoes. And root vegetables, baked in lard. Fried chicken, fried in lard. Roasted fennel glazed with lard sugar and sea salt. Pies, with lard inside and out. All from lard he made himself in the kitchen.

"It seems funny," Silver says, "but for thousands of years this was the thing that people cooked with.

A century ago, lard was in every American pantry and fryer. These days, lard is an insult.

"The word lard has become this generally derogatory term associated with fat and disgustingness," says Dan Pashman who hosts a food podcast called The Sporkful. "Think about Lard-ass, the character from the movie Stand By Me. I mean, he didn't want to be called Lard-ass."

How did this delicious, all-natural fat from a pig become an insult? Who killed lard?

Lard didn't just fall out of favor. It was pushed. It was a casualty of a battle between giant business and corporate interests.

Today's big jobs report is full of good news. A few key details:

* The U.S. added 243,000 jobs last month. Manufacturing, the sector that got hit hardest during the recession, added 50,000 jobs. Construction, which also got walloped, added 21,000 jobs.

* The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent — the lowest since February, 2009.

* A broader measure of unemployment fell to 15.1 percent. This measure includes those who have given up looking for work over the past year as well as those working part time because they can't find a full-time job.

In absolute terms, the job market is still in bad shape: Before the recession, an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent would have been viewed as a disaster. There are five million fewer U.S. jobs today than there were five years ago.

But the trend over the past few months is very promising. Not only is the economy adding jobs; the rate of job growth is accelerating. The job market is getting better, faster.

Bonus Graphic:

As of the end of last year, unemployment rate for college-educated people in their 30s and 40s was just 3 percent. For people in their early 20s without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate was 20 percent.

Which is to say that the single number usually used to describe the U.S. labor market — the unemployment rate — obscures multitudes.

You can use the chart above to see how the unemployment rate has changed over time for people of all ages and all levels of educational attainment. The chart shows annual averages through 2011. Seasonally-adjusted monthly data aren't available at this level of detail.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

American Airlines filed for bankruptcy in November. The company needs $18.5 billion to cover its pension promises to current and former employees, but it has only set aside $8.3 billion.

Taxpayers could wind up on the hook for billions. Here's why.