Planet Money

The U.S. Constitution famously outlaws “cruel and unusual punishments.” But there's another, far more obscure part of the Constitution called the Excessive Fines Clause, which basically says that the fine has to fit the crime. So far, the Supreme Court has been pretty mysterious about what that means. But for Ken Jouppi, the fate of his $95,000 plane hinges on it. Ken is a bush pilot. He used to r...

When TikTok videos started to go viral on Instagram and Reddit, TikTok turned to professional sound designers to protect their content. More and more companies are paying to develop a “sonic identity” – a series of sounds, songs, and micro-jingles to help maintain a unified brand. In this episode, in conjunction with the sound design podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz , we hear the backstory to possibl...

Bjarne Caesar Skinnerup works as a maritime pilot in the straits of Denmark. That means he’s used to seeing oil tankers. But after the start of the war in Ukraine, the tankers started getting weird. They were flying flags he’d never seen before. They were old, very old, though many had taken on new names. Something was off.  He’d stumbled on a shadow fleet of hundreds of tankers ferrying sanctione...

In 1975, New York City ran out of money. For a decade it had managed to pay for its hundreds of thousands of city employees and robust social services by taking on billions of dollars in debt. But eventually investors were no longer willing to lend the city any more money. New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy — the city shuttered more than a dozen firehouses, teachers went on strike and gar...

The U.S. government spends a ton of money, on everything from Medicare to roads to defense. In fact, it spends way more than it takes in. So…it borrows money, in the bond market. By selling U.S. Treasurys, basically IOUs with periodic interest payments. And for decades, people have loved to invest in Treasurys, for their safety and security.  But lately, Treasurys have started to look riskier.  In...

Pre-order the Planet Money book here for your free gift.   Our sister show, The Indicator, is chronicling the evolving business of crime for its Vice Week series. Today, we bring to you two cases of crime in the age of AI.  First, cybercriminals are using our own voices against us. Audio deepfake scams are picking up against individuals but also against businesses. We hear from a bank on how they’...

It’s here! It’s free to download and playtest! It’s the Planet Money game! ( Download here .) Download and playtest the game go here   Sign up for the 11/1 virtual AMA event and get updates about the game Submit your feedback on the game Watch the how-to video with Kenny and Elan for playtest instructions In this episode, the story of how we arrived here. Ride along as our game-making partners at...

We want to make a board game. It must, of course, teach the world about economics. It must be fun. It’d be nice if it sold lots of copies! How hard could that be!? (Monopoly and Catan are hugely popular and basically little economy simulators, after all.) Well, turns out, it’s quite hard! We’re in a golden age of tabletop games. Thirty years ago there were around 800 new games each year. Now it is...

The next time you open your fridge, take a second to behold the miracles inside of it: Raspberries from California, butter from New Zealand, steak from Nebraska. None of that would have been remotely possible before the creation of the cold chain.  The cold chain is the name for the end-to-end refrigeration of our food from farm to truck to warehouse to grocery store and ultimately to our fridges...

On Wall Street, fortunes are often won and lost with the tiniest advantages. And for the past few years, one trading firm has stood out from the rest for both huge profits and careful secrecy — Jane Street Group. But last year, one of Jane Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading strategies was unexpectedly revealed in a Manhattan courtroom. The news ricocheted around the world. It drew the att...

Israel has been blocking the flow of physical money into Gaza since the start of the war. So whatever paper cash was in Gaza before the war, that’s all that’s been circulating. It's falling apart from overuse.  Two best friends, one in Gaza and one in Belgium, are now trying to get money in. But how do you get money into a bank account in Gaza? And how do you get that money out, in Gaza, when ther...

(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016 .) It’s no secret that CEOs get paid a ton – and a ton more than the average worker. More than a hundred times than what their average employee makes.  But it wasn’t always this way. So, how did this gap get so vast? And why?  On today’s episode … we go back to a specific moment when the way CEOs were paid got changed. It involves Bill Clinto...

Last month, President Donald Trump announced an unusual deal. Intel, the biggest microchip maker in America, had agreed to give the United States a 10 percent stake in its business. That means the U.S. government is now Intel's largest shareholder — and a major American company is now a partially state-owned enterprise.  This deal has raised a lot of eyebrows. The U.S. government almost never gets...

There’s one question we seem to be hearing everywhere: “ Is my job safe from AI? ” Dozens of you, our listeners, have written to us about this. Saying things like, “ Maybe my yoga teacher side gig is actually my safest bet now ,” and “ My parents were in real estate, and I never thought I’d say it ... but maybe that’s what I should do? ”   If only there were a list that could tell you which jobs a...

President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Federal Reserve from a few angles. So we wanted to look at other examples of political pressure on central banks, to see what it might mean for us and for the economy.  Enter the watchers. The people who’ve had their eyes trained on central banks all over the world, for years, notebooks out, scribbling down their observations. They’ve been trying to g...

When we stumbled upon Milk.com , we were mystified. It appears to be someone’s personal website. But memorable domain names can be worth a million dollars or more. So, why is someone using this valuable internet real estate to post their resume and favorite recipes?   Back in the internet’s early days, it was easy to get a domain name. They were cheap or even free. The first people to grab them ma...

The Federal Reserve has been under intense pressure from President Donald Trump as he pushes for more control over the historically independent agency. The Fed is tasked with keeping inflation and unemployment under control, and it’s supposed to be insulated from politics so it can do whatever is necessary for the economy. But Trump has been openly saying he wants interest rates to be lower. A lot...

Get your own personalized  summer school diploma here . Today on our final episode of  Summer School 2025,  we will test your knowledge. We will salute the unsung heroes of government service. And we will pick our valedictorian from among you of the class of 2025.  Editorial Note: President Trump attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve Board. Our daily podcast,  The I...

In the past couple years, demand has gone wild for drugs like Ozempic – and its cousins, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. For people who had never been able to lose weight before, suddenly the numbers on the scale were plummeting. And everybody wanted to get their hands on them.  Now, in most industries, if a product goes viral like this, it’s a golden ticket. And thanks to government-granted monop...

Tariffs are the favorite tool of our current president, but there are lots of other ways that governments insert themselves into the free exchange of goods and services. Some of these trade barriers are so insidious and have been going on for so long that it may surprise you that they even exist.  We bring you the classic story of what happens when you try to protect an American industry and end u...

For most Americans, we just lived through the highest period of inflation in our lives. And we are reminded of this every time we go grocery shopping. All over TikTok, tons of people have posted videos of how little they got for… $20. $40. $100. Most upsetting to us: an $8 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Food prices are almost 30% higher than they were five years ago. It’s bad. And those new, higher...

After President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists and statisticians across the board were horrified. Because the firing raises the spectre of potential manipulation – and it raises the worry that, in the future, the numbers won't be as trustworthy. So: we looked at two countries that have some experience with data manipulation. To ask what happens when governments...

LIVE SHOW: August 18th in Brooklyn. Tickets here. (PM+ supporters get a 10 percent discount off their tickets. Listen to the July 8th bonus episode to get the code!) In economics, a market is a place (even virtual) where buyers and sellers meet to exchange goods or services. Economists love markets. It's like all of our supply and demand graphs have come to life. Almost everything you buy goes thr...

LIVE SHOW: August 18th in Brooklyn. Tickets here . Traditional economics says the market is guided by the forces of supply and demand. Customers decide what they want to buy, and private enterprise responds to that need. So what makes government think that it's smarter than capitalism? Why offer tax breaks to Hollywood or incentives to build silicon chip factories in Arizona? Why those industries...

Trust in experts is down. In all kinds of institutions and professions - in government, in media, in medical science... and lately, economists are feeling the burn acutely. In fact, President Trump just fired the economist who ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her – with no evidence – of faking a jobs report that showed fewer gains than expected. In decades past, economists whispered in...