Planet Money

The United States has been at war with Iran since February 28th. And for a month and a half, Iran’s main leverage over the U.S. has been their control over the Strait of Hormuz — a key global shipping route. Iran has attacked ships that try to pass without approval. And recently they’ve insinuated that one part of the Strait — the part near Oman — is not safe. Which means that captains had to go r...

How do bookstores choose the books they stock, and how does that affect what customers read? It may not seem like it, but every shelf in a bookstore is a highly valuable and contested piece of commercial real estate. And for every new book that a bookstore decides to stock, there are thousands of others that did not make the cut. So how do bookstores make those decisions? And how will the Planet M...

Live event info and tickets here.   If your company got bought by a private equity firm, how would you feel? Maybe a little nervous? You might find yourself wondering if there will be layoffs. And you’d be right to worry about that. Research shows that while private equity ownership can boost a company’s productivity, it does generally result in job cuts.  But one private equity executive is tryin...

Live event info and tickets here.   When ingredient costs skyrocket, companies have three basic options: They can raise their prices (a sort of product-specific inflation), shrink the size of the products (often called “shrinkflation”), or, sometimes, find more creative ways to reduce costs by degrading the quality of their products - which our very own Greg Rosalsky has dubbed as  “skimpflation.”...

Live event info and tickets here.   For more than 60 years, Cuba has survived on two seemingly contradictory economic strategies: leaning on friendly communist and socialist countries, and flirting with capitalism. And right now it seems the US is making both strategies impossible. Since January, the U.S. has been preventing almost all oil from reaching the island. Doctors can’t get to the hospita...

LIVE SHOW TOUR INFO HERE. New stories, live tapings, special guests, book signings and more.  What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out the window? On today’s show, how the Squamish Nation reclaimed a sliver of prime urban real estate and were liberated from zoning restrictions, to the consternation of their wealthy NIMBY neighbors. We trace the 100 year saga of what...

When you come across a book at a yard sale or a bookstore, you might pay more attention to the words between the covers than the physical form of the book itself. But content and the form are both crucial to a book’s success. Each book you pull off the shelf, is the product of thousands of decisions, big and small, tying together vast supply chains and armies of workers from around the world.  On...

In the age of TikTok and Polymarket, it can be easy to overlook the humble book. But books are one of the most influential technologies ever invented. From “The Wealth of Nations” to “Das Kapital,” books have the power to shape whole economic systems… and everything else in our world. The market for books can determine which ideas make it to the masses.  So when Planet Money was approached to make...

The cardinal tetra is one of the most popular pet fish in the world. They look like little red and blue sequins. You've almost certainly seen them at the pet store or the fish tank at your dentist's office. They're everywhere.  Not so long ago, most of the world's supply of cardinals came from just one place. It's a little town deep in the rainforests of Brazil, where locals still catch these fish...

Robby the chef has lots of endearing qualities. He can make over 5000 dishes, he’s a consistent cook, and he’s never late for work. But he’s not a human. It is a 750 lb. stainless steel robot. With a rotating wok at its center. It’s a wok-bot.  Automation has changed many industries. But automation only started entering restaurant kitchens in the past couple decades. Which raises the question – wh...

Live event info and tickets here. If something is going wrong in your workplace, there's probably a law that explains why. Meetings always seem long, and never end early? There’s Parkinson’s Law, which says work expands to the time allotted, or, restated: meetings will always take up all the time blocked on Outlook calendars. Is your boss bad at managing? Check the Peter Principle, which says peop...

What do we want from sports? The very best athletes competing as hard as they know how, putting all their effort and training and natural ability to the test against their opponents. But this time of year, that’s not the product the NBA is putting on the court. Instead, teams at the bottom of the league are competing … to lose, because it could help them get a top pick in next year’s draft. It’s c...

Heated Rivalry , the steamy hockey romance show, was made for about $2 million per episode.  That is remarkably cheap for an hour-long drama. Today on the show, a conversation with Heated Rivalry creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady about their television miracle on ice. It’s not just that the show was made efficiently and cleverly. Heated Rivalry comes from a Canadian economic system of makin...

The world of science has been stuck in an existential crisis over whether we actually know the things we thought we knew. Re-running an old study today doesn't always yield the same result. Same with re-enacting old experiments. Collectively, this is known as the “replication crisis.”  Economist Abel Brodeur has come up with one way to help fix this crisis: he’s invented an internationally crowdso...

Live event info and tickets here . ICE is scaling up, with rapid new hiring. So we ask, has training new officers changed? At what cost?  Also, the Trump administration has plans to pour billions of dollars into warehouses for mass immigrant detention centers, which can totally change the economy of some areas. We hear from a rural town in Georgia that wants an ICE facility in its own backyard.  T...

Live event info and tickets here. The Supreme Court has spoken. Those big, sweeping tariffs that President Trump imposed early last year? They’re illegal.  On today’s show: Why were those tariffs struck down? Will anyone get refunds? And …what about this new 10 percent tariff the President just announced today?  Plus — a growing market for tariff refunds. Further Listening: - Worst. Tariffs. Ever....

Book tour and ticket info here. Greenland has said it is not for sale. Denmark has said it can’t even legally sell Greenland. And at a security conference in Munich over the weekend, U.S. lawmakers spent a lot of time trying to walk back some of President Trump’s recent threats to try to buy, or even take over, the territory.  But whether Trump can or will or should try to control or purchase a te...

Book tour event details and ticket info here . An iconic cartoon character liberated from copyright, journalism from the world of competitive spreadsheeting, a controversial piece of US currency. Each year the Planet Money team dedicates an episode to the things we simply love and think you, our audience, will also love. In this year’s Valentine’s Day episode: The Public Domain Day list from Jenni...

Book tour tickets and details here . Today, the story of three inventions. The first, the sewing machine, was created by a selfish and ambitious inventor who wanted all the credit and was willing to fight a war for it.  The second, a more modern invention, was made by an Italian inventor who wanted only to connect the world through video, so “evvvvverybody can talk with evvvvverybody else.” And, a...

Book tour tickets and details here . The recent protests in Iran are about so many things. Human rights, corruption, freedom. But this time – they are also motivated by economic hardship. Hardship caused, in part, by US sanctions.  The US has been sanctioning Iran in one way or another for 47 years. But sanctions, as a tool, only work some of the time, and US sanctions on Iran have not always conf...

Planet Money book tour ticket info and dates here .  A record number of Americans with poor or just okay credit are behind on their car payments. And once last year’s numbers are tallied, an estimated 3 million cars will have been repossessed in 2025. That would be on par with how bad it got during the Great Recession. What’s going on? And why now?  Today on the show, we focus on the micro part of...

Book tour dates and ticket info here . Housing is too expensive. Everyone knows this. Democrats know that talking about it plays well with voters. And now – in a midterm election year – President Donald Trump seems to be focused on it, too.  His administration has recently started talking more about affordability. And they’re taking action with two new initiatives that aim to make buying a house e...

In the 1990s, Congress created HOPE VI, a program that demolished old public housing projects and replaced them with more up-to-date ones. But the program went further than just improving public housing buildings. HOPE VI was designed to transform neighborhoods with concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that attracted people with different incomes. Some people who moved to HOPE VI neighborhoods...

Book tour dates and ticket info here . Just as every market has its first movers, every religion has its martyrs — the people willing to risk everything for what they believe. Pastor Dave Hodges just might be a little bit of both. He’s the spiritual leader of the Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants, in Oakland, California which places psilocybin mushrooms at the center of their religious practi...

Planet Money has teamed up with the company Exploding Kittens to make a board game inspired by the legendary economics paper The Market for Lemons. We’ve decided we want a mass-appeal party game that quietly sneaks in the economics, so that we can report from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has entered: the real shelves at real big box retail stores.  We have a great game mechani...