Sometimes you hear these stories about an airplane that suddenly nosedives. Everyone onboard thinks this is it, and then the plane levels out and everything is ...

Since we started Planet Money Records and released the 47-year-old song “Inflation,” the song has taken off. It recently hit 1 million streams on ...

Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th largest bank in America, the bank of choice for tech startups and big-name venture capitalists. Then, in the span of just a ...

Over the past year, dozens of shows have been disappearing from streaming platforms like HBO Max and Showtime. Shows like Minx, Made for Love, FBoy Island, and ...

As a kid, Ryanne Jones’ friend accidentally hit her in the mouth with a hammer, knocking out her two front teeth. Her parents never had enough money for ...

The 90s sit-com Seinfeld is often called “a show about nothing.” Lauded for its observational humor, this quick-witted show focussed on four ...

If you are a congressperson or a senator and you have an idea for a new piece of legislation, at some point someone will have to tell you how much it costs. ...

More than 20 years ago, something unusual happened in the small town of Dixfield, Maine. A lady named Barbara Thorpe had left almost all of her ...

This episode originally ran in 2020. In 2005, Franklin Leonard was a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. A big part of his job ...

Every year, the U.S. government spends more money than it takes in. In order to fund all that spending, the country takes on debt. Congress has the power to ...

A lot of the time, economic policy can seem pretty impersonal — cold, hard, data-driven. But at the heart of the Federal Reserve are people: fallible, ...

Every Valentine’s Day, we at Planet Money consider the things that we love, the things that we can’t stop talking about, the things that get our ...

Take a look in any supermarket ice cream freezer section and you may see a mystery. There are big containers of the typical ice cream brands: Breyers, Turkey ...

Anyone who has tried shopping for day care knows that it is tough out there. For one, it is hard even to get your hands on information about costs, either ...

It’s Groundhog Day, and once again, the eyes of the nation have turned to a small town in Western Pennsylvania. Every February 2nd, the only story anyone ...

A great economics paper does two things. It takes on a big question, and it finds a smart way to answer that question. But some papers go even further. The ...

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games in history. The game’s staying power may in part be because of strong American lore — the idea that ...

Some of history’s biggest financial scams owe their name to Charles Ponzi. Here’s the story of the man behind the eponymous scheme. Subscribe to ...

Driving a truck used to mean freedom. Now it means a mountain of debt. Subscribe to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney See ...

If the Fed had a mantra to go along with its mandate, it might well be “two percent.” We look into how that became the target inflation rate, why ...