On today's Planet Money:

Economist Joel Waldfogel says giving gifts people don't want isn't just bad for the recipients, it's bad for the economy. According to his research, billions of dollars are wasted each year because of holiday shopping. A professor at Wharton, he has spent years surveying his students about the value of gifts they have received. Based on those surveys, Waldfogel says the spending others do for us produces about 20 percent less satisfaction than the spending we do for ourselves.

Despite the title of his book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents For The Holidays, Waldfogel says he doesn't want to end gift giving, in fact he enjoys it. He says he just wants us to think harder about who we are buying for and maybe choose a gift card over that reindeer sweater.

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The car giant announced that starting in January it will fix or replace pedals in 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles to prevent runaway acceleration first blamed on improperly installed floor mats.

Toyota launched the voluntary recall one month after a 2009 Lexus ES 350 sped out of control on a San Diego highway, killing off-duty California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor, his wife, Cleofe Lastrella; their daughter Mahala; and Chris Lastrella, Cleofe's brother.

The recall affects the 2007-2010 Toyota Camry, the 2004-2009 Toyota Prius, the 2005-2010 Toyota Avalon, the 2005-2010 Tacoma, the 2007-2010 Toyota Tundra, the 2007-2010 Lexus ES 350 and the 2006-2010 Lexus IS 250 and IS 350.

Separately on Wednesday, data showed that new jobless claims fellto the lowest level in more than a year last week.

Personal consumption expenditures rose by 0.7 percent in October, reversing a drop the prior month. Incomes also rose last month, but at a slower pace than spending, climbing by 0.2 percent.

And the luxury goods market appears to be stabilizing, as Tiffany and other top-line retailers continue to report better-than-expected earnings. The jeweler reported U.S. sales were lower in the third quarter, contributing to a 1 percent profit decline. But results, which topped its own expectations, led Tiffany to raise its full-year forecasts.

Tiffany said the rate of sales decline in the U.S. slowed through the quarter and many countries in Asia and Europe achieved better-than-expected sales.

There is one silver lining to the recession. The global economic engine has slowed so much that it's pumping out less greenhouse gases. For the first time in decades, annual carbon-dioxide emissions are expected to drop this year.

Instead of growing at 3 percent or so, emissions are expected to shrink by 3 percent. The savings is roughly what you would get by taking all the cars in the U.S. off the road. Or shutting the whole planet down for three weeks.

Scientists have lots of ways of tracking global conditions, so I got to wondering if the financial crisis would leave its mark in the physical environment, maybe get encoded in some tree ring, or in a bubble of gas trapped in a layer of antarctic ice - something an alien civilization might discover in the distant future, point to and wonder what had happened.

It turns out there is a record of the Great Depression in ice cores because lead pollution declined.

But I emailed several climate scientists to ask if the current carbon dioxide reductions would leave a trace. The answer seems to be no....

You would need a very high accumulation rate site to see this. The problem is that the air as it is trapped in the ice continues to mix with the atmosphere for a while, so you get a very smoothed out record, and short-lived events will not be visible. I am positive that somewhere in Antarctica -- where you get the very very highest accumulation rates, over 2 m a year of ice (that is 5 m or more of snow), with very precise measurements one could retrospectively see an event like this. But it's unlikely anyone would ever do it. With snowfall rates that high, you don't get very far back in time after a lot of drilling, so it isn't very appealing.

Richard Alley, Penn State University:

Great idea, but my suspicion is that the answer is "no". The emissions are believed to have dropped, so the rate of growth of CO2 will be slightly lower this year than last. (Growth in the concentration will continue, because emissions are still well above the rate of removal from the air into the ocean or wherever else the CO2 is going.) So, if we had a really really good record of the CO2 with sufficiently high time resolution, we would see a bump.

The ice-core records that "work"--cold enough and clean enough ice to avoid artifacts linked to meltwater dissolving CO2 or dead flies in the ice decaying and giving off CO2--have the bubble-trapping depth a few tens of meters down below cold snow being squeezed to ice by the weight of more snowfall on top. If you release a tracer (say, someone had the beans last night for dinner...) in the air above the snow, it takes about 5 years for diffusion in the tiny spaces over 70 m or so to transfer a notable amount of the tracer to the bubble-trapping depth, and along the way a sharp, short-lived spike of tracer will be smoothed out into a bell-curve-like shape.

For ice-core analyses, the uncertainty in the measurement is just under 1 part per million. (With larger samples, measurements in the free air are more accurate.) We've been raising CO2 something like 1-2 ppm per year, and the effect of dropping our emissions by a few percent will be a few percent of 1 ppm, so is not detectable in the ice-core data with modern technology even before it is smoothed out, which it will be."

The future of Saab was thrown into doubt on Tuesday after General Motors announced a consortium led by Swedish investors pulled out of talks to buy the premium car brand.

The deal's collapse marks the second failure by GM in less than two months to sell a money-losing brand. In October, Penske Automotive Group abandoned a deal to acquire GM's Saturn because of doubts about securing a long-term supply of vehicles.

In February, GM said it was seeking a buyer for Saab, Saturn and Hummer as part of a drive to pare down its product portfolio as it prepared for US government-funded Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It now appears more likely than not that GM will shutter Saab and Saturn, and honor warrantees and other customer services through its remaining car units.

Recent talk of a recovery in housing prices appears premature. Prices as a whole recorded an 8.9 percent drop in the third quarter, compared to a year earlier -- a big improvement from the 15 percent and 19 percent drops in the prior five quarters, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. But the drop for the closely watched 20-city index, 9.4 percent, was worse than expected.

Las Vegas remains the most depressed market in the U.S. Prices have declined for 37 consecutive months, with a peak-to-trough reading of -55.4 percent. While Detroit has seen some positive movement in recent months, the market is still at only 73 percent of its 2000 value. This compares to regions such as Los Angeles, New York and Washington, which have maintained values of 70-80 percent above their 2000 averages, in spite of the market downturn.

More than half of artists have seen their income fall in the last year, with nearly 18 percent of respondents reporting an income loss of more than 50 percent during the recent recession, according to a new study.

Incredibly, many artists also said they were inspired by the hard times, with some reporting they were happy to have more time to spend on their art because they were out of work. Three out of four of the 5,200 artists surveyed said that it was an inspiring time to be an artist, and 89 percent felt that artists could play a special role in strengthening their communities during turbulent economic times.

The report found the majority of artists work a second job (and about 20 percent work a third job) to finance their art; musicians and architects make more than painters and writers; and the majority have college degrees.

By Caitlin Kenney

The FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund, which protects bank deposits, fell below zero in the third quarter of this year. Fifty U.S. banks failed, taking the fund down to negative $8.2 billion. It's only the second time in the agency's history that it has slipped into the red.

Despite the dip, depositors remain protected. The government agency set aside extra reserves of $38.9 billion this year to cover estimated losses. Adding in that additional money, brings the Deposit Insurance Fund's reserves up to $30.7 billion. The FDIC also has the ability to tap into an emergency credit line from the Treasury Department if it needs to.

So far this year, the FDIC has seized and sold 124 banks. The list of "problem banks" stood at 552 at the end of September.

"For now, the credit adversity we have been discussing for some time remains with us, and we expect that it will be at least a couple of more quarters before we see a meaningful improvement in that trend," Shelia Bair, FDIC Chairman said. "Despite the challenges, I am optimistic that if we address these problems head-on, we will see clear signs of improvement in bank earnings and lending in 2010."

The FDIC saw their total insured deposits increase by 10 percent last quarter, reflecting a temporary increase in the amount the deposit insurance fund covers.

Broad and rapid government stimulus measures helped the global economy to avert the worst of the recent financial crisis, but the global economy remains highly vulnerable to new shocks, International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Monday. He said it is far too early to end fiscal interventions as an early exit may jeopardize a fragile recovery.

"The storm has passed. The worst has been averted," he said at the Confederation of British Industry annual conference in London Monday. With unemployment at historic levels, and still climbing, he said it's difficult to claim that the crisis is over and added global banking systems remain undercapitalized, weighed down by toxic assets and a rising number of non-performing loans.

The IMF is looking at a controversial plan for a tax on all financial transactions as a way of forcing banks to pay for any future bailouts. Critics of the plan say a punitive tax on the financial services sector could harm the recovery at a delicate time.

Analysts say rising gas prices are helping online sales because shopping online lets consumers drive less.

And talk about a deal. A judge has cleared the way for Pontiac, Mich., to sell the stadium that was once home to the NFL's Detroit Lions to a Canadian company for $583,000 - a little more than 1 percent of the cost of building the domed sports stadium in 1975. An original deal fell through in a dispute over environmental cleanup costs.

The Lions abandoned the 80,300-seat Silverdome in 2002, when they moved to Detroit's Ford Field. Pontiac has been spending $1.5 million a year to maintain the largely unused stadium.

On today's Planet Money:

Nuhu Ribadu spent years fighting corruption in Nigeria. From his early days in the Nigerian police force to his later years as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ribadu battled the corruption that strangled his country's economic growth. He had some success for a while, but after two attempts on his life, he was forced to leave his home country and come to the United States. He shares the stories of his struggle and says he hasn't given up yet.

Download the podcast; or subscribe. Music: TV On The Radio's "Staring At The Sun." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.

The notion that lower-income people make up the majority of our armed forces has led to sayings like "rich man's war, poor man's fight."

Now, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has an unusual ideato equalize the cost of war: a war tax on the rich.

An "additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000" a year, could fund more troops, Levin proposed in an interview for Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital With Al Hunt," this weekend.

The tab, Levin said, should be paid by wealthier taxpayers. "They have done incredibly well, and I think that it's important that we pay for it if we possibly can," the senator said.

Sales of existing U.S. homes increased 10.1 percent in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.10 million, the National Association of Realtors estimated Monday. The rate was the highest since February 2007.

Sales were up 23.5 percent from the same time last year. Every region in the country experienced a pick-up. Meanwhile, the national median home price fell 7.1 percent to $173,100 in October compared to the same time last year.

Also helping oil higher: The U.S. dollar tumbled after a Federal Reserve official called for an extension of the central bank's asset-purchase plan beyond its planned expiration date. A weaker dollar tends to push up dollar-denominated commodities prices such as oil.

In 2007, riots broke out from Egypt to Haiti when food shortages grew around the globe. Food prices have been rising for years as overall demand continues to outstrip supply and structural problems with how food is grown and distributed around the world worsen.

Last year's recession eased food inflation but policy experts are worried prices could rise soon, impacting developed countries still hurting from the recession and poorer countries with little breathing room for even minor dips in the food supply.

On a positive note, more money is starting to pour into agriculture after decades of neglect. Both public and private sectors are doing more to help farmers than ever. In 2009, the World Bank increased its spending on agriculture by 50%, to $6 billion.

But progress is slow. At a United Nations-backed food security summit in Rome this month, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization argued world hunger could be wiped out if aid-giving countries spent $44 billion a year.

Jacques Diouf, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, spoke of his "regret" that countries attending the Rome gathering set neither "measurable targets nor specific deadlines" for aid aimed at tackling undernourishment among one billion people worldwide.

None of the leaders of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations attended except for Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

Microsoft Corp. and News Corp. have held talks to create a Web pact that would include Microsoft paying News Corp. to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry, the Financial Times reports.

News Corp. initiated the talks although the Financial Times says that Microsoft had also approached other online publishers about removing their sites from Google's search engine in exchange for content payment.

Meanwhile, Chinese banking regulators are putting pressure on the country's banks to raise more capital and temper their rapid growth in lending, in the clearest signs yet of official concern about the sustainability of the nation's credit boom.

On a sad note, the Wall Street Journal (subs req'd) reports that there are early signs the number of suicides in the U.S. crept up during the recent recession. The Journal's data covers about 40% of the U.S. population.

Thirteen states, accounting for 30% of the U.S. population, reported more suicides in 2008. In Florida, for instance, suicides were up 6%, in Georgia, up 2.3%, and in North Carolina, up 7.8%. In six smaller states, which account for about 9.5% of the population, the number of suicides fell.

On today's Planet Money:

We continue our search for answers about why MRI prices can differ so greatly. This time we travel from New Haven, Conn. to Japan, where an MRI costs only $160. Why? Well, it's because of the government, the quality of the machines and as we'll hear from neurologist Dr. Michiko Kimura Bruno, because Japanese people really love MRIs.

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