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. ...
NPR
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 ...
Welcome to the Planet Money Movie Club, a regular series from Planet Money+ in which we watch an economics-related movie and discuss! On today’s episode, ...
Xi Jinping recently secured his third term as China’s president – so we’re looking at two shocks to the world’s second-largest economy. ...
We got our hands on the long-lost “Inflation” song, and now it’s time to put it out into the world. So, we started a record label, and ...
We try to start a real record label. Just to put one song out there. It’s a song about inflation, recorded in 1975… and never released. Until now. ...
When it comes to international trade and finance, everyone pretty much speaks one language: the U.S. dollar. So when the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates ...
How do you mend a broken bill? On this classic episode, we visit the Mutilated Currency Division. Subscribe to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at ...