Planet Money
Episodes
The fight for a legendary shipwreck's treasure
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The San Jose was a marvel of 17th century technology. The Spanish galleon weighed more than a thousand tons, was made of wood reinforced with iron, an...
How the scratch off lottery changed America
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Americans spend more on scratch lottery tickets per year than on pizza. More than all Coca-Cola products. Yet the scratch ticket as a consumer item ha...
How DeepSeek changed the market's mind
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Monday, the stock market went into a tizzy over a new AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek. It seemed to be just as powerful as many of its Ameri...
Re-imagining the energy grid ... through batteries (Two Indicators)
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to solar and wind power, renewable energy has always had a caveat: it can only run when the wind blows or the sun shines.The idea of a b...
The "chilling effect" of deportations
25 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After being sworn into office, President Trump signed a whole host of executive actions and orders that affirm his campaign promise to crack down on i...
After the fires
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The fires in Los Angeles are almost out. Residents are starting to trickle back into their burned-out neighborhoods. When they get to their houses, th...
Tariffs, grocery prices and other listener questions
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump is just about to begin his second presidency. And it may be safe to say that every single person in America has at least one question abo...
The Land of the Duty Free (classic)
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2018.)Is it really cheaper to shop at an airport Duty Free store? And why are so many of them alike?In the 1940s...
The case for Fed Independence in the Nixon Tapes
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You know Watergate, but do you know Fedgate? The more subtle scandal with more monetary policy and, arguably, much higher stakes.In today's episode, w...
ZIP Codes!
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The ZIP code is less like a cold, clinical, ordered list of numbers, and more like a weird overgrown number garden. It started as a way to organize ma...
The potato-shaped loophole in free trade
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since free trade opened up between the US and Mexico in the 1990s, trillions of dollars of goods have been going back and forth between the two c...
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn't thi...
The Rest of the Story, 2024
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After the gift exchange comes another great holiday tradition: returns season. Once again, we are joining the fun in our own Planet Money way. We are ...
The Indicators of this year and next
25 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This year, there was some economic good news to go around. Inflation generally ticked down. Unemployment more or less held around 4-percent. Heck, the...
The habitat banker
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our planet is in serious trouble. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction, and the biggest cause is companies destro...
How sports gambling blew up
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in...
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do some nations fail and others succeed?In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how econ...
Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (update)
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them?Today on the show, we tell t...
There Will Be Flood
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local offi...
George Soros vs. the Bank of England
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As people learn more about Donald Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, one story comes up over and over: a legendary trade that he play...
How useful, really, are the steps you can take after a data breach?
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The dreaded data breach notification... It tells you your personal data's been compromised and suggests steps you can take to minimize the potential h...
Why you bought your couch
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought it. Because it was comfy. Or blue. Or the right price. B...
Title Pirates
23 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A couple years ago, Gina Leto, a real estate developer, bought a property with her business partner. The process went like it usually did: Lots of pap...
The long view of economics and immigration (Two Indicators)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mass deportations. What would actually happen—economically—if the President-elect follows through on promises to deport millions of people from Am...
The great German land lottery
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every ten years, a group of German farmers gather in the communal farm fields of the Osing for the Osingverlosung, a ritual dating back centuries. Osi...
The strange way the world's fastest microchips are made
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the story behind one of the most valuable — and perhaps, most improbable — technologies humanity has ever created. It's a breakthrough cal...
What markets bet President Trump will do
09 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On the day after the election, Wall Street responded in a dramatic way. Some stocks went way up, others went way down. By reading those signals — by...
Moving to the American dream? (update)
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Back in the 90s, the federal government ran a bold experiment, giving people vouchers to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones....
The veteran loan calamity
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ray and Becky Queen live in rural Oklahoma with their kids (and chickens). The Queens were able to buy that home with a VA loan because of Ray's servi...
So your data was stolen in a data breach
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you... exist in the world, it's likely that you have gotten a letter or email at some point informing you that your data was stolen. This happened ...
Why do hospitals keep running out of generic drugs?
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There's something strange going on in hospitals. Cheap, common drugs that nurses use every day seem to be constantly hit by shortages. These are often...
Romance on the screen and on the page: Two Indicators
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On today's show, we have two stories from The Indicator, Planet Money's daily podcast. They just launched Love Week, a weeklong series exploring the b...
The Subscription Trap
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past two decades, there's been a sort of tectonic economic shift happening under our feet. More and more companies have switched from selling...
We asked 188 economists. And the survey says...
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(For our story on this year's Nobel in Economics, check out our daily show, The Indicator!)Let's face it. Economics is filled with terms that don't al...
So imPORTant: Bananas, frogs, and... Bob's??
11 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Even in our modern world with planes and jets and drones, the vast majority of goods are moved around the planet in cargo ships. Which means our ports...
Can cap and trade work in the US?
09 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, the state of Washington embarked on an ambitious new plan to combat climate change. Taking a page from economics textbooks, the state instit...
What's up with all the ads for law firms?
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The lawyer commercial is almost an art form unto itself. Learned practitioners of the law doing whatever it takes to get your attention, from impressi...
How Venezuela imploded (update)
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016.)Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn't have enough food. Ho...
What's THAT got to do with economics?
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy."That is the bold promise in Planet Money's tagline. And we believe the sh...
Veep-onomics
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Next week, JD Vance and Tim Walz will face off in the only confirmed vice presidential debate ahead of the election. As voters look ahead to what thei...
How to save 10,000 fingers
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Table saws are extremely dangerous. The government estimates that injuries from table saws send something like 30,000 people to the emergency room eve...
Can money buy happiness?
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
People often say that money can't buy you happiness. Sometimes, if you ask them to tell you more about it, they'll mention a famous 2010 study by Nobe...
99 Percent Invisible: The White Castle System of Eating Houses
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today we have a guest episode from 99 Percent Invisible.It is about White Castle, the burger chain. Even if you haven't visited, you have tasted its i...
Rate Expectations
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to get inflation under control. One side effect is that taking out a mortgage to buy a home has gotten very ...
Is AI overrated or underrated?
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Are the promises made by AI boosters all hype, or are we actually under-appreciating the transformative potential of AI?Can artificial intelligence ma...
Summer camp capitalism
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Summer camp is a classic rite of passage in the U.S. It's a place of self-discovery, where kids come to make new friends and take on new challenges. B...
Bingo! (Presidential debate edition)
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Campaigns can be a jargony slog. And this year, we are seeing a lot of economic terms being thrown around, many of which... aren't entirely straightfo...
How to fix a housing shortage
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When Cody Fischer decided to get into real estate development, he had a vision. He wanted to build affordable, energy efficient apartments in Minneapo...
Summer School 8: Big ideas and life lessons from Marx, Keynes and Smith and more
28 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Take the 2024 Planet Money Summer School Quiz here to earn your personalized diploma!Find all the episodes from this season of Summer School here. And...
The trade fraud detective
23 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When David Rashid took over US autoparts maker Plews and Edelmann, the company was losing business to its Chinese rival, Qingdao Sunsong. Both compani...
Summer School 7: The Great Depression, the New Deal and how it changed our economy
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School. When we last left the Uni...
The hidden world behind your new "banking" app
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You might have seen ads for online banking services that seem to offer a lot of great stuff — accounts you can open in minutes and without a minimum...
Summer School 6: China, Taiwan and how nations grow rich
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for vid...
Will the Olympics break breakdancing?
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For some sports, picking the winner is simple: It's the athlete who crosses the finish line first, or the side that scores the most goals. But for the...
Summer School 5: 250 years of trade history in three chapters
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for vid...
What to do when you're in a class action
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Maybe you got a boring slip of paper in the mail. Maybe you got a spammy-looking email promising you money. Surprise! You're in a class action. If you...
Summer School 4: Banker vs president and the birth of the dollar
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for vid...
Summer School 3: The first stock and perpetual life
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for vid...
What Kamala Harris' economic agenda might look like
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last weekend we were all thrown for a loop when President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris for the nomination...
The color monopoly
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2022, artist Stuart Semple opened up his laptop to find that all his designs had turned black overnight. All the colors, across files on Adobe prod...
Summer School 2: The golden ages of labor and looms
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Who has the power? Workers or bosses? It changes through the ages, though it's usually the bosses. Today, we look at two key moments when the power of...
Rooftop solar's dark side
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
4.5 million households in the U.S. have solar panels on their homes. Most of those customers are happy with it - their electricity bills have just abo...
Summer School 1: An Economic History of the World
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Planet Money Summer School is back for eight weeks. Join as we travel back in time to find the origins of our economic way of life. Today we ask surpr...
How flying got so bad (or did it?)
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We often hear that air travel is worse than it's ever been. Gone are the days when airplanes touted piano bars and meat carving stations — or even f...
The two companies driving the modern economy
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the core of most of the electronics we use today are some very tiny, very powerful chips. Semiconductor chips. And they are mighty: they help power...
Do immigrants really take jobs and lower wages?
29 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We wade into the heated debate over immigrants' impact on the labor market. When the number of workers in a city increases, does that take away jobs f...
The Carriage Tax (Update)
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2019.)In 1794, George Washington decided to raise money for the federal government by taxing the ri...
The Vapes of Wrath
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When the vape brand Juul first hit the market back in 2015, e-cigarettes were in a kind of regulatory limbo. At the time, the rules that governed toba...
Why is everyone talking about Musk's money?
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space comp...
What's with all the tiny soda cans? And other grocery store mysteries, solved.
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There's a behind the scenes industry that helps big brands decide questions like: How big should a bag of chips be? What's the right size for a bottle...
Bringing a tariff to a graphite fight
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Graphite is sort of the one-hit wonder of minerals. And that hit? Pencils. Everyone loves to talk about pencils when it comes to graphite. If graphite...
How much national debt is too much?
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Most economic textbooks will tell you that there can be real dangers in running up a big national debt. A major concern is how the debt you add now co...
The history of light (classic)
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a ...
How the FBI's fake cell phone company put criminals into real jail cells
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is a constant arms race between law enforcement and criminals, especially when it comes to technology. For years, law enforcement has been frust...
So you've been scammed, now what?
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too ...
The junkyard economist
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On today's episode, we ride through the streets of San Francisco with a long-time junkman, Jon Rolston. Jon has spent the last two decades clearing ou...
Anatomy of a layoff
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By one estimate, 40 percent of American workers get laid off at least once in their careers. And when that happens, companies will often say, "It's no...
The hack that almost broke the internet
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, the world narrowly avoided a cyberattack of stunning ambition. The targets were some of the most important computers on the planet. Comput...
Why Gold? (Classic)
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the past few months, the price of gold has gone way up – even hitting a new high last month at just over $2,400 per troy ounce. Gold has long had...
Zombie mortgages are coming back to life
10 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Karen McDonough of Quincy, Mass., was enjoying her tea one morning in the dining room when she saw something odd outside her window: a group of people...
Inside video game economics (Two Indicators)
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do video game workers offer labor at a discount? How can you design a video game for blind and sighted players? Does that design have lessons for ...
The birth of the modern consumer movement
03 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today on the show, the story of the modern consumer movement in the U.S. and the person who inspired it: Ralph Nader. How Ralph Nader's battle in the ...
Hire Power (Update)
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2021.)Millions of American workers in all sorts of industries have signed some form of noncompete agreement. The...
The case of the stolen masks
26 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
About thirty years ago, Yagya Kumar Pradhan woke up to the news that the temple he and his clan used had been broken into. The temple had been ransack...
How unions are stopped before they start (Update)
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americ...
FTX and the Serengeti of bankruptcy
19 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For the last year and a half, the story of FTX has focused largely on the crimes and punishment of Sam Bankman-Fried. But in the background, the actua...
Grocery prices, credit card debt, and your 401K (Two Indicators)
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What's going on with consumers? This is one of the trickiest puzzles of this weird economic moment we're in. We've covered a version of this before un...
TikTok made me deduct it
12 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
TikTok, and other apps like it, are filled with financial advice. Some of it is reliable, some... less so. There are videos about running a business, ...
How much does this cow weigh? (Classic)
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode originally ran in 2015.About one hundred years ago, a scientist and statistician named Francis Galston came upon an opportunity to test h...
Japan's Lost Decades
05 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, Japan's central bank raised interest rates for the first time in 17 years. That is a really big deal, because it means that one of the spo...
The real estate industry on trial
03 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2019, Mike Ketchmark got a call. Mike is a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, and his friend, Brandon Boulware, another lawyer, was calling about a c...
How much of your tax dollars are going to Israel and Ukraine
29 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about whether the U.S. should continue to financially support the wars in Ukraine an...
The trouble with Table 101 (Update)
27 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2020.)In the restaurant game, you need to make the most of every table every minute you are open. And you need t...
What is Temu?
22 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It is rare that a new e-commerce company has such a meteoric rise as Temu. The company, which launched in the fall of 2022, has been flooding the Amer...
How Big Steel in the U.S. fell
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Steel manufacturing was at one point the most important industry in the United States. It was one of the biggest employers, a driver of economic growt...
The billion dollar war behind U.S. rum
15 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When you buy a bottle of rum in the United States, by law nearly all the federal taxes on that rum must be sent to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Isl...
Wind boom, wind bust (Two Windicators)
13 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The wind power business is a bit contradictory right now. It's showing signs of boom and bust seemingly all at once. The story of wind energy markets ...
On the Oscars campaign trail
08 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When you sit down to watch the Oscars, what you are really watching is the final battle in a months-long war of financial engineering and campaign str...
Is dynamic pricing coming to a supermarket near you?
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dynamic pricing is an increasingly common phenomenon: You can see it when Uber prices surge during rainy weather, or when you're booking a flight at t...
Shopping for parental benefits around the world
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It is so expensive to have a kid in the United States. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries worldwide with no federal paid parental leave; i...