So the president can’t spend more money than Congress has agreed and voted to spend. But can the president spend less money than Congress wants? It all ...

There has been chaotic uncertainty around billions of dollars allocated by Congress. The Trump administration ordered a pause on — and review of — certain ...

The trip that changed Tigran Gambaryan’s life forever was supposed to be short — just a few days. When he flew to Nigeria in February of 2024, he ...

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, and ...

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 has only ...

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 American ...

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 battery ...

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 ...

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, they face a ...

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 about ...

(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, if ...

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, we ...

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 mail after ...

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 countries, ...

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 think ...

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 returning ...

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 Fed even ...

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 destroying ...

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 economists ...