NPR: David Kestenbaum

Last year, as part of a reporting project, we bought a toxic asset — one of those complicated financial instruments that that nearly brought down the global economy.

We spent $1000 of our own money and bought a tiny slice of a bond backed by mortgages. We paid just a fraction of what it originally cost. It was such a good deal, we thought maybe we'd make a few bucks, which we'd give to charity.

The U.S. has the dollar. Japan has the yen. Now some people are trying to invent a new currency that's not tied to any country or government. It's called bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a lot like cash — for the online universe. It doesn't actually exist in the physical world. You can't hold bitcoins in your hand because they just live on computers and the Internet.

You would never look at a map of the Hudson River, point to the spot where the Tappan Zee Bridge is, and say, "Put the bridge here!"

Elon Musk wants humans to live on other planets one day. But he's worried about the cost of getting there. So in 2002, he took the fortune he made in Internet start-ups and started his own rocket company. He called it SpaceX.

The company is still in its early days. It's had seven launches, four of which made it into orbit. According to the company's website, the price to put stuff in orbit runs around $2,000 to $3,000 per pound.

Musk says SpaceX's latest rocket in development, the Falcon Heavy, will be able to do it for as little as $1,000 a pound.

We recently reported on the the government's failed effort to persuade Americans to use dollar coins.

But the coins have found at least one group of fans: Travel enthusiasts who buy thousands of dollar coins with credit cards that award frequent-flier miles for purchases.

Once in possession of the coins — shipped to them by the government for free — they can deposit them into their bank accounts and pay off the credit card bills. The result: a free ticket to anywhere.

Politicians in Washington hardly let a few minutes go by without mentioning how broke the government is. So, it's a little surprising that they've created a stash of more than $1 billion that almost no one wants.

Unused dollar coins have been quietly piling up in Federal Reserve vaults in breathtaking numbers, thanks to a government program that has required their production since 2007.

And even though the neglected mountain of money recently grew past the $1 billion mark, the U.S. Mint will keep making more and more of the coins under a congressional mandate.

Jon Gnarr is an absurdist Icelandic comedian. Last year, he ran for mayor of Reykjavik. Like most absurdist comedians, he had no political experience.

"I just invented a new political party," he says. "I was not drunk or anything."

Gnarr called his party the "Best Party." Because what could be better than the best party?

He created a 10-point campaign platform — with 13 points.

This is the latest in a series on Iceland by Planet Money correspondent David Kestenbaum and Planet Money's Icelandic intern, Baldur Hedinsson. Here's more from their trip to Iceland.

This was supposed to be the beginning of what passes for spring in Iceland. But a volcanic eruption is coating much of the country in grey ash.

Last fall, we bought a quarter-ounce gold coin. A few weeks ago, we sold it. The price of gold rose while we owned the coin. But because we had to pay a commission and sales tax when we bought it, we wound up losing a little money in the end.

In this story — the last in our series on gold and the meaning of money — we try to answer one final question: Is gold in a bubble?

During the financial crisis, only one Western country experienced a true collapse of its banking system: Iceland.

Things got so bad that the country actually ran out of foreign currency. Even today, years later, foreign money is still scarce, and the government controls how much anyone can get.

The strange story of how Iceland ran out of money begins in 2003. The country had just privatized its banks. These sleepy state run institutions suddenly grew, and started running ads in foreign countries. For example:

The Case-Shiller home price index is a powerful way to look at the story of housing in America. You can see the boom and bust all in one simple graph.

But when we go on the radio to talk about home prices, a graph isn't much good to us — nobody can see it.

So we converted the Case-Shiller graph into musical notes.

Gold is up. The dollar is down. People are worried about the value of paper money.

There was a time, of course, when paper money was backed by gold — the era of the gold standard. The story of why that era came to an end includes a nervous breakdown, a global panic, and a presidential adviser who was an expert on cows and chickens.

The gold standard was a promise. If you had a dollar, you could take it to the government any time you want, and trade it in for a fixed amount of gold. In the U.S. year after year, $20.67 got you an ounce of gold.

Last weekend, the people of Iceland went to the polls to make a big decision: Should they pay for the mistakes of a bank that failed in the financial crisis?

It was called Landsbanki. During the boom, its balance sheet became larger than Iceland's entire economy. Its high-interest savings accounts attracted hundreds of thousands of people from the U.K. and the Netherlands.