Planet Money

  • Why the price of Coke didn’t change for 70 years (classic)

    Prices go up. Occasionally, prices go down. But for 70 years, the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola didn’t change. From 1886 until the late 1950s, a bottle of coke cost just a nickel. On…

  • A man, a plan, wind power, Uruguay

    In 2007, Uruguay had a massive problem with no obvious fix. The economy of this country of 3.5 million people was growing, but there wasn’t enough energy to power all that growth. Ramón Méndez Galain…

  • The flight attendants of CHAOS

    When contract negotiations between Alaska Airlines and their flight attendants’ union broke down in 1993, the union had a choice to make. The union — The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA — knew that if they…

  • A trucker hat mystery, the curse of September and other listener questions

    Ba-dee-yah! Say do you remember? Ba-dee-yah! Questions in September! That’s right – it’s time for Listener Questions! Every so often, we like to hear from listeners about what’s on their minds, and we try to…

  • The natural disaster economist

    There seems to be headlines about floods, wildfires, or hurricanes every week. Scientists say this might be the new normal — that climate change is making natural disasters more and more common. Tatyana Deryugina is…

  • A black market, a currency crisis, and a tango competition in Argentina

    The Nobel-prize winning economist Simon Kuznets once analyzed the world’s economies this way — he said there are four kinds of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan… and Argentina. If you want to understand what happens when…

  • “Based on a true story”

    When a group of amateur investors rallied around the stock for GameStop back in 2021, the story blew up the internet. News outlets around the world, including us here at Planet Money, rushed in to…

  • How to launder $600 million on the internet

    Erin Plante is a private detective who specializes in chasing down stolen cryptocurrency. In March of 2022, she got the biggest assignment of her career: Hackers had broken into an online game called Axie Infinity…

  • China’s weakening economy in two Indicators

    In China, data on the economy is sometimes difficult to come by. The Chinese government has put a pause on releasing some of its official economic data. But many of the stories emerging from the…

  • Is economists’ favorite tool to crush inflation broken?

    When economists and policymakers talk about getting inflation under control, there’s an assumption they often make: bringing inflation down will probably result in some degree of layoffs and job loss. But that is not the…

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