Planet Money

Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy a luxury brand item secondhand (say, a Chanel handbag) you had to have an in. There was no easy way to find one. But over the past decade, the market for secondhand luxury goods has exploded. There are now many online resellers where you can shop for used and discounted luxury items. One big problem — how can you be sure if it’s real and authentic? Some onlin...

Come along as we travel the world in search of the best economic ideas to bring home! From the beaches of Barbuda to the fjords of Norway, there's money (and money problems) everywhere. For this summer travel season, Planet Money Summer School will take you on a world tour for your ears. Pack that sense of wonder and nose for adventure, this is our semester abroad. We’re going to explore exotic lo...

Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest soccer scorer of all time. But when it comes to penalty kicks, Messi is merely average. Why? Maybe the answer involves game theory. According to game theory, there’s an optimal strategy for taking penalty kicks. This strategy involves an idea that was once somewhat controversial in economics — that is, until economists started studying soccer players in real l...

Will limiting how much students can borrow force schools to lower their prices?  The Department of Education thinks so. It has a new plan to bring down tuition costs. Starting today, July 1st, it’s going to cap how much it’s willing to loan to graduate students.  You read that right. To reduce the burden of school…the plan is to give students less money to pay for school.  This plan is, in part, b...

In the early 90’s, a company called General Magic began working on a portable device that would allow people to check email, make phone calls, even play games. It was basically a smartphone. But it never caught on. On today’s show, a theory about why this device failed. General Magic had generous investors, world-class talent and creative freedom. But is it possible what they needed was constraint...

Prediction markets aren’t new. Election betting was common until the 1940s, then mysteriously faded away. There was an entire political era when party bosses were expected to conspicuously gamble on their candidates (even if they secretly hedged). And in the 1980s, a few economists designed an election market that beat out election polling 74 percent of the time. Today, we’re running an excerpt fr...

Maybe the real monster in the Alien franchise isn’t actually the killer alien. Because behind the acid blood and jump scares is an even more insidious horror: a single employer with unchecked power. That employer is named Weyland-Yutani, a mega-corporation that dominates workers across the galaxy. Weyland-Yutani is a sort of extreme example of what economists call a monopsony — when one employer d...

The cyber weapon that might have prevented nuclear war. The U.S. and Israel have long been in conflict with Iran over their nuclear development program. Some of that conflict has been out in the open, with bombs and blockades, but some of it has been invisible.  Recently some security researchers discovered a cyberweapon likely tied to that invisible conflict. It looks like it was designed to hide...

Can the government stop you from cutting down your own tree? In many towns and cities these days, removing a tree now requires a permit. You might have to pay a fee, or promise to plant replacement trees. But sometimes, the city won't let you cut down the tree at all, even a tree in your own backyard. That's because trees are important for air quality, for flood control, and for public health. The...

One specific type of affordable housing used to be popular in American cities, kept rents low, then nearly vanished. Is it time to reconsider boarding houses and single room occupancy units? If they lowered rents in cities, why did they go away? We have the history. Then, let’s talk about corporate landlords. They’re blamed for driving up rents. Studies show they do the opposite. When corporate la...

One reason the $70 billion supplement industry is set to double in the next seven years? Lax regulation. On today's show, we tell the story of a century-long battle between the U.S. government and … you , the people, blinded by your love of a magic pill. We’re talking about protein powders, pre-workouts, creatine, stuff for gut health, joint health, vitamin C, turmeric supplements. All that. You m...

Have you ever walked around a street, mall, or airport and noticed two or three of the same franchise restaurant within walking distance? Why might one Starbucks or McDonald’s or Wetzel’s Pretzels sometimes be built so close to another? Are they friends or competitors? And how can that possibly be profitable? Today’s show is one such example. Our pals at Hyperfixed got a knotty question we just ha...

99% of chemicals in our food right now were added without FDA approval. Many were added in secret, through a sneaky loophole built into the 1958 Food Additives Amendment. It was supposed to require FDA approval for new additives. But food companies and chemical makers found a workaround. And the FDA formally okayed the loophole in the 90s — in the process bringing attention to a loophole to the lo...

Tax avoidance -- that is, legally reducing your tax bill -- is as American as apple pie. But the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion is often a grey one.  On today’s show, a collaboration with Tax Notes , we listen in on the secret tapes that show how the wealthiest Americans avoid taxes.  We trace the lifecycle of a tax loophole: how it was born (in Malta), how it grew, how the Feds cracke...

How does a poor country become a rich country? There's a simple blueprint — or at least, that's what many economists used to believe. But over the years, a lot of rapidly developing economies have stalled out. These countries aren't poor anymore, but they're not rich either. They're stuck in the middle. The World Bank calls this problem the "middle income trap." And if there's a poster child for t...

Do you work more for more money? Or work less for more time? For some, this is the ultimate economic choice.  Every single worker in the European Union is guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation. No matter how long they’ve been at a company. No matter how low paying the job is. Vacation is a right.  In fact, all but one of the richest countries in the world guarantees paid vacation, except: the U.S...

If you have a credit card, hope to buy a house, or just want stable grocery prices – let’s talk about the future of Fed independence! It’s impossibly important for the Federal Reserve to steer monetary policy without political interference – an ideal pushed to its brink during Jerome Powell’s time as Fed Chair. Powell’s Fed faced a once-in-a-century pandemic, oversaw the economy as inflation spike...

Recently, a listener wrote in with a question about OPEC and oil prices. She was prepping for a camping trip… thinking about how much it costs to fill up her diesel-guzzling camper van at the pump.  “It would be so awesome if you guys could do an episode explaining OPEC to us,” she emailed us. She wanted to know: why does OPEC exist? Why does it limit the supply of oil? And now that the United Ara...

Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes competition. She – and a Nobel Prize winning economist – were on the team that negotiated a ground-breaking contract for the players. And Alysha wrote all about it in her journal. Alysha is the oldest player in the league – and when she started she was making a yearly salary of about $36,400...

Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game’s highest paid players. He took the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series three times. Then he got traded to the Phillies. He didn’t want to go. But baseball’s rules said he had no say in the decision. He could either go to Philly or quit the sport. Instead, Flood took Major League Baseball to court. Flood argued that the lea...

In the world of commercial publishing, there are few crowning achievements more coveted than a place on the New York Times Best Seller List. But how does a book actually end up there? There is, of course, a playbook that publishers and authors use to try to gin up enough sales at the beginning of a new book’s life to launch it onto the list. But there is also a world of more shadowy techniques – a...

It’s way more than fuel costs that pushed Spirit Airlines to the brink of liquidation and led President Trump to muse about “buying” them. Many low cost airlines are struggling due to a canny and calculated set of strategies from bigger airlines that we can think of as ‘revenge of the legacy carriers.’  Today on the show, we go back in time to when Spirit was riding high and pressuring the whole i...

At one point in history, one U.S. company monopolized the rare earths industry. Then China took over the industry. Can the U.S. bring it back? Rare earths are critical to making, like, everything. From smart phones to electric vehicles to microwaves. They’ve also become a powerful political weapon for China, which controls the majority of mining and processing of rare earths.  Today, we have the s...

We talk with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Chief Economist at Redfin Daryl Fairweather about two of the biggest issues of our time: AI and housing.  We have been crisscrossing America doing live shows to help promote the new Planet Money book. In each city, we’ve been doing interviews with special guests. And since we won’t be able to make it to every city in America (or most cities) we want...

Have you noticed a lot of young people getting into antenna-maxxing as alpha? Or, maybe searching for any bit of copium after they fat-fingered and got rinsed? Or maybe they farmed during a yes-fest on Mention Markets resulting in some serious printing?  If none of that made sense to you, then we have the perfect episode for you.  Prediction markets have taken off in the past few years, using the...