Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy. At Planet Money, we explore the forces that shape our lives and bring you along for the ride. Don't just understand the economy – understand the world.Wanna go deeper? Subscribe to Planet Money+ and get sponsor-free episodes of Planet Money, The Indicator, and Planet Money Summer School. Plus access to bonus content. It's a new way to support the show you love. Learn more at plus.npr.org/planetmoney
435 episodes transcribed(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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in...
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...
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...
Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local offi...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mass deportations. What would actually happen—economically—if the President-elect follows through on promises to deport millions of people from Americ...
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...
This is the story behind one of the most valuable — and perhaps, most improbable — technologies humanity has ever created. It's a breakthrough called...
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 b...
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....
