Business

Bitcoins are a digital currency, attractive to those who prefer not to leave a paper trail when they buy and sell things online. Over the past two years, the Bitcoin community has widely expanded and the value of the currency has fluctuated wildly.

Smashing through walls and yelling "Oh, Yeah!" apparently aren't cool enough for Kool-Aid Man anymore.

Hi, it's another installment of Ask A Banker. We've gotten lots of good questions, and also lots of bad questions, on Twitter and email, but answered only a fraction of them, in part because in some columns I just answered questions that I or Planet Money made up. Sorry. So let's make up for lost time by giving short answers to a bunch of real questions from real people, or at least real email accounts.

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Well, that was fun, but some people might still need some tax tips, so now let's turn to Marilyn Geewax. She's a senior business editor at NPR. Marilyn, thank you so much for stopping by.

MARILYN GEEWAX, BYLINE: Hi, Michel. I do have some of those tax tips for all of your procrastinators out there.

MARTIN: OK. So what's the first thing someone should do if he or she has still not filed his or her taxes, especially if they're filing the old-fashioned way by snail mail?

Satellite TV distributor Dish Network has offered to buy telecom giant Sprint Nextel Corp. in a $25.5 billion deal, a move that could derail a similar offer by the Japanese phone company SoftBank.

Dish says that it has offered $17.3 billion in cash and $8.2 billion in stock for Sprint. After the news was announced on Monday, Sprint's stock jumped 15 percent in pre-market trading, according to The Associated Press.

Federal aviation officials have ordered that more than 1,000 Boeing 737s be examined to see if a key part on the plane's tail section needs to be replaced, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued the airworthiness directive for a pin that holds the 737's horizontal stabilizer to the rest of the tail, to see if it is in danger of failing prematurely. The horizontal stabilizer — also known as the tail plane — enables the pilot to control the aircraft's pitch.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And let's stay on the topic of billionaires.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Sure.

GREENE: Bloomberg News is reporting that billionaire investor John Paulson has lost more than $300 million as a result of the slide in gold prices. After climbing for years, gold has recently lost considerable ground. And it's widely expected to fall even further this week.

Here's NPR's Jim Zarroli.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with billion-dollar paychecks.

(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC)

INSKEEP: Institutional Investor's Alpha, a publication focusing on hedge funds, releases its annual Rich List today.

And that list estimates the world's top 25 fund managers who earned a combined $14.4 billion last year - which is down slightly from the year before.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And our last word in business today is: The Cicada Index.

Every 17 years, these nasty, loud, little insects known as Brood 2 cicadas emerge in staggering numbers - as many as on billion per square mile from the Carolinas to Connecticut.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

They have a grinding song. They have an endless appetite for vegetation, and most people along the East Coast dread their arrival. But savvy investors know better.

The intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and 28th Street looks like a lot of intersections in Los Angeles: There's a Taco Bell on one corner and a strip mall with a liquor store and a Liberty Tax Service office on the other. And out in front, as traffic speeds by, 27-year-old Robert Oliver is hard at work — dancing.

"So, chest movements like this, this is called bucking," he says. His chest bounces to the beat. His Bluetooth headphones are on. And his feet glide across the hot sidewalk like he's on ice. "I come up in here and I go down, and that's called a kill-off."