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Sometimes it feels like all we talk about at Planet Money is how the economy is going down the tubes.

On today's show, though, we visit a few people who have been doing well this year. There's a guy with a gold vault. A company that sells off inventories for bankrupt stores. And the king of coconut water.

Ok, so that list doesn't exactly scream economic revival. Maybe 2012 will be better.

Happy new year.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: DJ Earworm's "World Go Boom." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Enlarge godutchbaby/Flickr

godutchbaby/Flickr

A couple of years ago if you wanted to drink coconut water, you had to buy your own coconut, bring it to your kitchen, and start whacking away with a knife.

Today, you can find packaged coconut water in a convenience store, Wal-Mart or your friendly neighborhood yoga studio.

"I think it was a great year for coconut water, " says Alejandra Simon, an assistant manager at the Laughing Lotus yoga studio in New York City. "I can't walk down the street without seeing someone with coconut water in their hands."

If you want to know how coconut water pulled off a marketing miracle this year, you have to come to a place like like Laughing Lotus. This yoga studio does not sell sports drinks. They only have coconut water

This summer, Standard & Poor's downgraded America's credit rating. In other words, S&P decided that the U.S. government had become a slightly less reliable borrower.

Lots of people freaked out about the downgrade. It fit the familiar decline-of-America narrative and came in the middle of the endless debt-ceiling debate.

Fortunately for the U.S., one key group did not freak out: the bond investors who actually lend money to the U.S. government.

Interest Rate On 10-Year Treasury Bonds

Source: Treasury

Credit: Alyson Hurt

If investors thought the U.S. was less likely to make good on its debts, they would have demanded higher interest rates. (Just ask Italy.) Instead, the interest rates on U.S. government debt actually fell after the downgrade. Today, rates are under 2 percent — well below where they were at the start of the year.

This is a clear sign that investors still trust the U.S. government. But it also shows investors are still worried about the broader economy and are shying away from riskier investments. ("Flight to quality" is the phrase often used to describe this behavior.) When investors start to get more optimistic about the economy, the interest rate on Treasury bonds is likely to creep back up.

Fox Photos/Getty Images

Below is an excerpt from Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, "The China Threat." Read all of Adam's Times Magazine columns here.

While much has been written about Chinese factories' stealing U.S. manufacturing jobs and destroying our businesses, the two countries have reached an uneasy, unspoken economic agreement over the past decade. American firms find they can compete with low-cost manufacturing by constantly developing new products. This has worked out well for U.S. companies — though, notably, not for U.S. manufacturing workers — because there are much fatter margins in owning the intellectual property of a hot new thing than there is in churning out a huge volume of cheap components. And these higher margins manifest themselves in higher salaries for American workers.

Partly as a result, the U.S. still dominates the world of research and development, as it has for more than a century. The country spends nearly double the annual R.-and-D. budgets of Japan and Germany combined. But China's decade long rise from a non-player in R. and D. to the world's second-largest spender poses a serious threat. A recent study by the Battelle Memorial Institute, a research firm, predicts that China's spending will match ours around 2022. In research terms, that is effectively today.

Courtesy Universal

Rihanna did not have the song of the summer.

On today's podcast, we take a page from radio newscaster Paul Harvey and tell you "the rest of the story."

We look back at the podcasts we've done in 2011 and tell you what we got right, what we got wrong and how everything turned out in Wisconsin and Iceland. Plus, we try to to figure out why that Rihanna song that cost so much money, bombed on the radio.

In case you missed them, here are the original podcasts featured in today's show:

Bitcoin

How Many Jobs Has Scott Walker Created?

Manufacturing The Song Of The Summer

A New Mom, Bjork's Dad And The President Of Iceland

Is This Man A Snuggie?

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: The Black Keys' "The Lengths," Rihanna's "Man Down," LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," Rihanna's "We Found Love," Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains," and Jonathan Coulton's "Want You Gone." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

When the internet kills a big box retailer, Gordon Brothers is the undertaker.

"They're stuck with selling the things that are inside the box," says bankruptcy lawyer Steve Jakubowski.

Gordon Brothers specializes in retail liquidations. When a store dies, they put on a suit, greet the guests and sell them whatever remains. And that means everything — not just books and clothing and DVDs, but shelves, lighting fixtures, even the chairs.

The liquidators can make a lot of money off the stuff inside the box. Jakubowski says when Borders was liquidated, liquidators bought the merchandise at 72 percent off inventory cost to Borders.

"But remember when they sell it at retail, let's just assume that everybody marks it up double, " says Jakubowski.

Caitlin Kenney/NPR

Students show off the results of their trades.

Giving and receiving gifts can be a joyful thing — unless you're an economist. All those books that will never be read and ties that will never be worn are hugely inefficient.

To investigate a possible solution, we went to a seventh-grade classroom at a public school in Brooklyn.

The students were already familiar with the issue.

"This is kind of silly, but I got a Power Ranger," Tadre Jones said. "I was grateful, but I didn't really like it."

So we had no trouble conscripting 10 kids to participate in an economic experiment that aimed to improve the efficiency of gift giving.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Kanye West's "Christmas In Harlem." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

I wish I'd been the first, second or third person to think of getting a bunch of econ types to submit their entry for Chart of the Year. Alas, the BBC, the Atlantic and Wonkblog all beat me to it.

The originals are all worth clicking through. But if you're too busy even to look through a few dozen charts (really?), or if looking through a few dozen charts doesn't sound as fun to you as it sounds to me (plausible), I've picked four that really seem to nail it, for different reasons.

1. GDP came back. Jobs didn't.

Mark Perry

Mark Perry writes:

the chart helps to tell the story of two different sides of an economy in recovery: we've seen huge gains in productivity and a recovery in output, but at the same time we see a labor market struggling to recover, with the possibility that it will take many more years or even a decade to regain all of the millions of jobs lost during the recession

I've been immersed in reporting on lobbying for a while now. So when I look at the House Republicans' failure to extend the payroll tax cut, I ask myself: What's the fundraising strategy?

Usually when politicians do things that the public at large would seem to oppose, you can find the explanation in special-interest lobbying.

But most businesses do not want taxes going up on their customers, and I can't imagine many lobbyists in DC want payroll taxes to go up. Lobbyists can exert considerable influence on the legislative process. Why not now? If I were slightly more cynical I'd ask: Why are lobbyists letting this happen?

Well, this morning we got the answer from Ben White at Politico's Morning Money. In an item headlined "Where are the Business Lobbyists?" White writes that many "deep-pocketed business lobbyists" in DC are "boiling with rage," over the tax showdown, but:

One of the top lobbyists in D.C. explains: "A very senior leadership aide told me this is a member to member matter now and all about caucus politics and positioning and no degree or measure of lobbying from outside interests will influence the outcome. We are spectators at a dysfunctional and buffoonic clown show."

In the past five years, more than 2 million construction jobs have disappeared in America. That's huge. Construction accounts for just one twentieth of all U.S. jobs, but for a third of the jobs lost since the start of the recession.

Of course, five years ago was the peak of a massive real estate bubble. There was too much building going on. A healthy economy would never have created that many construction jobs in the first place.

Today, the construction industry is in a massive slump. Things are brightening a bit, but the pace of construction is still near historic lows. In the space of a few years, we went from freakishly many construction jobs to freakishly few.

This raises a question: How many construction jobs would there be in a healthy U.S. economy? And, by implication, how many of those lost construction jobs aren't coming back?

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, we called an economist — Heidi Shierholz, of the Economic Policy Institute — who helped us come up with a number: In a healthy economy, we'd have about 6.5 million construction jobs.

That's a million fewer construction jobs than we had at the peak of the bubble — and a million more than we have today.

Construction Jobs

Numbers in millions

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: Jess Jiang and Nelson Hsu

Dennis Cook/AP

Jack Abramoff in 2004. He's the one on the right.

Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist, is out of prison and available for interviews. On today's show we talk to him — not about his crimes, but about the legal kind of lobbying that goes on every day.

Enlarge Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Note: This is the first of two related posts.

In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson writes, "savings...have fallen steadily for more than 30 years, from a high of nearly 12 percent of income."

To continue the discussion, we asked two economists on different sides of the debate - Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University and Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University - to answer the following question:

Why are Americans so bad at saving?

Annamaria Lusardi's answer is below. To read Laurence Kotlikoff's response, click here.

I had not thought to check the sales of nail polish lately, so instead I will turn to one of the other points raised in Davidson's column, which is whether Americans are saving enough. To determine that, we normally turn to the National Income and Product Accounts statistics (men's underwear sales and wine auctions are not normally good proxies for saving), but, like the column, I will turn to some other indicators to discuses the state of saving in the United States.

According to a 2009 TNS Global Survey, when Americans were asked whether they could come up with $2,000 in 30 days, half of the respondents in a representative sample of the U.S. population said, "no." This means that half the population does not appear to have the means to deal with a small financial shock, such as an important car or home repair, to say nothing of a large shock, such as job loss.

Note: This is the second of two related posts

In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson writes, "savings...have fallen steadily for more than 30 years, from a high of nearly 12 percent of income."

To continue the discussion, we asked two economists on different sides of the debate - Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University and Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University - to answer the following question:

Why are Americans so bad at saving?

Laurence Kotlikoff's answer is below. To read Annamaria Lusardi's response, click here.

America has a saving problem. Our national saving rate in 2009 was negative 1.7 percent. Last year it was 0.1 percent. This year it's running at 0.6 percent. You have to go back to the early 1930s to find saving rates this low. In the fifties and sixties we saved roughly 14 percent of national income. It's been a generally downhill ride ever since.

Who's spending so much more? It's not Uncle Sam. His rate of consumption spending, be it on defense or White House janitors, is a lot lower than it was. The answer is the elderly. Their consumption has risen dramatically relative to that of all other age groups.

AFP/Getty Images

An idle North Korean factory, seen from the Chinese border.

Kim Jong Il is dead. North Korean state media attributes his death to "great mental and physical strain" during a "high intensity field inspection." The FT notes that he "was known for his love of rich food and liquor, has been noticeably frail after suffering a suspected stroke in 2008."

In any case, our recent piece on North Korea's economy may be of interest in light of the news. Here's an excerpt:

North Korea used to be an industrial powerhouse. Not anymore. Today, the country can't feed its own people. Its cities go dark every night for lack of electricity.

Yet helplessness wasn't the original plan. The original plan for the country's economy had a name. It was called "juche," or self-reliance. The idea was that all North Korean problems should be solved by North Koreans.

...And if self-reliance requires drug-dealing and the smuggling of counterfeit goods, then so be it.

Read the full story, or listen to the podcast. For more, here's an obituary of Kim from NPR.

Chana Joffe-Walt/NPR

Andreas Georgiou (left) is the technocrat charged with running the Greek statistics office. Konstantinos Skordas (right) sits on a governing board for the statistics office

If you're looking for the beginning — and, possibly, the end — of the European financial crisis, you can find it in a single building: The Greek statistics office, at 46 Peireos Street in Athens.

We visited recently and found what may be the world's most high-stakes game of office politics.

On one side: The technocrats, led by Andreas Georgiou, who was appointed last year to run the office.

On the other : The old guard, including Konstantinos Skordas.

Georgiou's technocratic ways — like reporting Greek deficit figures directly to European authorities — have landed him in hot water with the old guard.

His email was hacked, he says. His workers went out on strike. And now he faces a criminal investigation that could lead to life in prison.

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