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A rainbow over the sea in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands.

Koichi Kamoshida /Getty Images

A rainbow over the sea in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands.

The Northern Mariana Islands are about 4,000 miles west of Hawaii. They look like the kind of tropical islands you see in the movies with bright blue water and white sand beaches.

The people who live on the islands are American. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is a U.S. territory. And just like a lot of U.S. states, the commonwealth has a pension plan for its government employees.

Sixto Igisomar used to run it.

"We always say that the CNMI pension plan is the best pension plan within the United States because the benefits were very good, " Sixto says.

They used to say that. Last month, the pension fund became the first public pension fund in the U.S. to seek bankruptcy protection.

DALTON, Mass. – If you were driving through this small town along the Housatonic River in the Berkshires, here's something you might not think about: All the bills in your wallet are visiting their birthplace.

The paper for U.S. currency, the substrate of everyday commerce, has been made here since 1879 by the Crane family.

Crane & Co. vice president Doug Crane represents the eighth generation descended from Stephen Crane, who was making paper before the American Revolution.

He gave NPR reporters a behind-the-scenes tour and talked about his company.

Amy the Nurse/Flickr

Mark Zuckerberg is, among many other things, the highest-profile taxpayer on the planet today.

After today's Facebook IPO, Zuckerberg will owe nearly $200 million in California state taxes alone. That's "among the largest tax liabilities that a single individual has ever paid at a given point in time," says Jason Sisney of the California State Budget Legislative Analyst's Office.

Zuckerberg's profits will be taxed at a 10% rate in California. That's a much higher rate than in many other states.

In all, Facebook's employees and early investors are expected to pay about $2 billion in California state taxes over the next 13 months. But California is almost 16 billion dollars in the hole. Facebook won't solve that problem.

Would that big, bad JPMorgan Chase trade have violated the Volcker Rule?

It's too soon to say, despite the fact that the rule is part of a two-year-old law.

The Volcker Rule bans deposit-taking banks from making speculative bets. But it allows banks to make investments to hedge risks.

Whether the JPMorgan trade counts as a hedge gone horribly wrong (and therefore kosher under Volcker), or as a speculative bet (and therefore prohibited) depends in part on the details of how the rule is written.

And those details have yet to be finalized.

The rule was included in the Dodd-Frank act, the big financial-reform bill that Congress passed in 2010. It was a few pages long in the statute.

The proposed details of how the rule will be implemented run to hundreds of pages. Five different regulatory agencies are collaborating. And the banks are weighing in with their own, extensive comments.

This long, slow implementation isn't unusual at all. It's entirely typical. Dodd-Frank called for hundreds of new rules; only 27 percent of those have been finalized, according to this recent report (PDF).

The details of the Volcker Rule are likely to be finalized later this year. But the regulators recently said banks will have until 2014 to comply fully with the final rule — four years after Dodd-Frank was passed, and six years after the financial crisis.

Paul Sakuma/AP

How much for that thumb?

Looking to get more popular on Facebook? Alex Melen will sell you 1,000 "likes" for about $75.

Melen runs an Internet marketing company. About six months ago, companies he worked with started coming to him more and more with a simple problem: They had created pages on Facebook, but nobody had clicked the "like" button.

"You would go there, and there would be two likes," Melen says. "And one of them would be the owner. And people right away lost interest in the brand."

For the right price, Melen can fix that.

Facebook knows an incredible amount about hundreds of millions of people — what they like, what they want, who their friends are, where they live. This is the key reason why investors think the company is so valuable. But that value only holds up if the data is real — if all those people actually like what they say they like.

Nick Sherman/Flickr

Pizza Delicious

Read More Of Our Facebook Coverage: Is Facebook Worth $100 Billion? and How Facebook Can Live Up To The Hype

Michael Friedman and Greg Augarten sell New York-style pizza in New Orleans. Their operation, Pizza Delicious, is a takeout window between Piety Street and Desire Street. They're only open two nights a week. If you're in the know, you can call them up and order a pie.

Business has been good, and they're about to buy their own place. So for the first time they're considering paid advertising. They'd been thinking about advertising on Facebook but didn't know how to proceed.

Meanwhile, we were working on some stories about Facebook and wanted to get inside the Facebook ad campaign and see if it really worked.

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern, a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Paul Sakuma/AP

When Facebook goes public this week, the company will be valued at roughly $100 billion.

It will be the highest valuation ever for an initial public offering of a tech company. Is Facebook really worth this much money?

One way to frame the question is to consider a single fraction.

NPR

Future central bankers of Ridgefield High

Every spring, high school students descend on the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve, a few blocks from Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. They compete to see who does the best impression of a central banker.

The High School Fed Challenge is a big deal. Schools like Montclair High in Montclair, New Jersey have multiple rounds of tryouts just to get on the team. Then they practice for months.

Montclair won the championship last year. This year, their challengers include a team from Ridgefield, Ct. A team so steeped in Fedspeak, that they frequently find themselves using Feddy words like "robust" and "well-anchored."

University of Chicago

"I'm 101 at the moment," Ronald Coase said.

I recently had a brief conversation with Ronald Coase.

"I'm 101 at the moment," he told me. "I get older by the minute."

Coase is a legend in economics. He won the Nobel prize. He has a theorem named after him. But China's rapid emergence as a global economic power — one of the most important developments of the past generation — took him completely by surprise.

"I thought it would take 100 years, if not more," Coase said.

It seemed striking that an economic legend could be so wrong about such an important subject. I asked Coase what he made of this.

"I've been wrong so often I don't find it extraordinary at all," he said.

Coase just co-wrote a new book. It's called "How China Became Capitalist."

Lam Thuy Vo/NPR

The Rickshaw Dumpling Truck is a retired postal van, painted red and filled with Chinese dumplings. I'm riding shotgun with Kenny Lao, the van's co-owner. It's a weekday morning, and we're driving into Manhattan looking for a killer spot to set up shop for the day.

"I think there is that mystical spot in midtown that every truck owner dreams of," Lao says. "Easy parking. It's a wide sidewalk. There's no restaurant but there's lots of offices."

There are 3,000 year-round food trucks and carts competing for that mystical spot. And no one has an official place to park.

Jacob Goldstein/NPR

"My mom opened the letter and she called me and told me I got the Marquis Scholarship. And she's like, 'It's a humungous scholarship!'" -Michele Tallarita

It's a gray April evening, and two men have driven from Easton, Pa., to Manhattan. The men are administrators at Lafayette College. They're wearing solid black suits with Lafayette pins on their lapels.

They're here to see 12 students — high school seniors who have been admitted to Lafayette and are trying to decide where to go to college.

The men have come to make the students "feel that Lafayette is in their future and make them think that they'll ruin their lives if they go elsewhere," says Greg MacDonald, Lafayette's dean of admissions.

MacDonald laughs as he says this. He's kidding. Mostly.

Jesse Garrison/Flickr

Enough already with the krona?

Iceland is a tiny nation in a big financial mess. It's still recovering from the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, which caused a domestic banking collapse.

Its currency, the krona, is also in really bad shape. That's led Icelanders to pose an existential currency question: Should they abandon the krona?

One key problem is size. Iceland has about as many people as Staten Island, so there just aren't that many people on the planet who need to use the krona.

"There are more people using Disney dollars," says Arsaell Valfells, an Icelandic economist.

The superPACs raising money to support presidential candidates have few restrictions. They can accept checks for any amount.

One rule they do have: They have to reveal who donated money.

Million-Dollar Donors

The List: SuperPAC Superdonors

Go down the list of people who have given a million dollars to a superPAC, and you realize many of them are not shy about their wealth.

"They're happy to give. They're proud to give. They want public recognition for having given," says Paul Seamus Ryan, a lawyer with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

But there are some donors who hide from public scrutiny.

On the list of million-dollar donors, there is a strange name. It looks like the kind of slang you'd see in a teenager's text message: "F8."

That's the donor's name — maybe pronounced "Fate"?

"I had no idea who the entity was," Ryan says.

And yet F8 in Provo, Utah, had given $1 million to Restore Our Future, the superPAC supporting Mitt Romney. And right next to it was another name unknown to our campaign expert: Eli Publishing — also a $1 million donor, and also located in Provo, Utah.

Charles Dharapak/AP

Yesterday, we reported on the fundraisers that lobbyists hold for Congressmen every day in Washington. Today, we hear what happens inside those events. The stories are part of our series on money in politics.

At a typical event, there's a member of Congress and a member of his or her staff who is in charge of collecting the checks. This person is known as the fundraiser.

"The fundraiser is standing in the room, and the fundraiser has 35,000 bucks in checks sitting in her pocket right now," says Jimmy Williams, a former lobbyist for the real estate industry. "And we're going to talk about public policy while we take the checks."

Robert Benincasa/NPR

Our story begins last month inside a busy Washington, D.C. subway station plastered with posters of giant dollar bills. One of them says: "Tell Congress to stop wasting time trying to eliminate the dollar bill." Another asks: "Do you heart the dollar?"

Political fights in the nation's capital normally involve billions or even trillions, not single dollars. What's going on here?

This being Washington, there's a back story. The $70,000 ad blitz was part of a small lobbying war over the fate of the dollar bill. On one side, leading a legislative charge to eliminate the dollar bill and replace it with a dollar coin, are Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and John McCain, R-Ariz.

"The most important thing is it's just more efficient. It's way more efficient than a paper dollar," Harkin says. "Canada has a coin that's worth $2 ... Switzerland has one worth about $5... And yet, what have we got? We got a 25-cent piece."