Americans spend more on video games than on tickets to the movies. Grand Theft Auto V was the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time, with sales of $1 billion in just three days.
But when you factor in everything — not just movie tickets, but on demand, rentals, etc. — Americans still spend way more on movies than they do on video games.
See the graphs and read more at Planet Money.
While a few gamblers bet real money on potential Nobel Prize winners, at Planet Money we’re content to merely speculate. We’re particularly interested in who might win the economics prize, which will be announced Monday morning.
The good folks at Thomson Reuters are interested, too. Each year, Reuters publishes a closely watched list of predictions about who might win. Since 2002, this list has successfully predicted the eventual economics laureate(s) five times. This year, it named three groups of economists as favorites.
Read about them at Planet Money.
I am asking this sincerely: Why does it matter who the next Fed chairman will be? What difference does it make if Larry Summers or Janet Yellen or someone else heads the central bank?
More to the point: What does the Fed chairman do? What kind of power does he or she actually have?
To find out, I called Joe Gagnon, an economist who worked at the Fed for nearly 20 years and who now works at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Read a condensed transcript of our conversation at Planet Money.
Seth Maxon 