Marketplace for Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Segments From This Episode

• Cities, states hit hard by copper theft

  by Jeff Tyler

  Copper prices are booming, so thieves are boosting anything they can sell to scrap yards. Among other things they're tearing apart infrastructure, leaving cities and states with big repair bills when their budgets are already bleak. Jeff Tyler reports.

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• Besides gas and food, prices are rising

  by John Dimsdale

  The Labor Department says businesses paid more for goods at the wholesale level last month — and that's not counting food and energy. If businesses are paying higher prices for everything else, eventually the rest of us will, too. John Dimsdale reports.

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• McCain, GOP have a cash-flow problem

  by Kai Ryssdal

  John McCain and the Republican Party are going to take on the eventual Democratic winner with a lot less cash than the GOP is used to. Politico writer Jeanne Cummings shares the details with Kai Ryssdal.

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• Cell-phone sales quiet down a bit

  by Stacey Vanek Smith

  

  Cell-phone sales have fallen for the first time in a couple of years. The number of new customers signing up has taken a double-digit dive, too. Market saturation is one reason. The slowing economy is another. Stacey Vanek-Smith reports.

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• Seeing the world through a realist lens

  by Marketplace Staff

  This week we're asking three future economists a simple question. Why take up a discipline that's been called the dismal science? For Andra Ghent it's because in a world full of idealists, economists are the hard-boiled truth-tellers.

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• Empty homes, ruined neighborhoods

  by Marketplace Staff

  Lenders are selling off thousands of houses they've foreclosed on for pennies on the dollar. And now the neighborhoods where those homes are located are crumbling. Mhari Saito reports from Cleveland.

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• A few moments of ZENN

  by Kai Ryssdal

  Automotive writer Dan Neil and Kai Ryssdal go for a quiet spin around downtown L.A. in one of the newest electric automobiles, the ZENN (Zero Emissions No Noise).

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