Planet Money

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...

Venezuela and Chevron have perhaps one of the strangest partnerships … ever? Chevron, one of the world’s most famous and profitable oil corporations, has for decades, been plugging away in Venezuela, one of the world’s most famous and infamous socialist countries.  Today on the show, the story of their intertwined histories. Before Saudi Arabia, before Iran… there was Venezuela, the first petrosta...

Before President Donald Trump’s first term, he was in a “tight spot” financially, according to New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick. At the start of his second term, David says, Trump was in an “even tighter” spot. But after just six months into his second term, Trump’s financial situation started looking really good. David has done a full accounting for what the family has been up to, and even usi...

Are we in an AI bubble? That’s the $35 trillion dollar question right now as the stock market soars higher and higher. The problem is that bubbles are famously hard to spot. But some economists say they may have found some telltale clues. On our latest: How do economists detect a bubble? And, how much should society be worried about bubbles in the first place?  Related shows: - How to make $35 tri...

The Afro is one of the most iconic hairstyles of the last century. And one of its main ingredients was a hair product – Afro Sheen. But Afro Sheen did so much more than make Black afros shine. It was the money behind the television show Soul Train, it helped fuel the civil rights movement – all because of an entrepreneur named George Johnson.  For decades, Joan and George Johnson owned and ran Joh...

We’ve been checking in on the economic conditions in Venezuela for about a decade now. In response to the U.S. strike and the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro this weekend, we’re re-surfacing this episode with an update. The original version ran in 2016 , with an update in 2024 . Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn’t have enough food. Hospitals didn...

2025 is finally over. It was a wild year for the U.S. economy. Tariffs transformed global trading, consumer sentiment hit near-historic lows, and stocks hit dramatic new heights! So … which of these economic stories defined the year? We will square off in a family feud to make our case, debate, and decide it.  Also, as we enter 2026, we are watching the trends and planning out what next years stor...

With the year coming to a close, we're sharing our most popular Planet Money bonus episode of 2025!  As U.S. trade with China exploded in the early 2000's, American manufacturing began to shrivel. Those workers struggled to adapt and find new jobs. It ran counter to how mainstream economics at the time viewed free trade ... that it would be a clear win for the U.S. Greg Rosalsky talks with David A...

Most stories keep going even after we set down our microphones and the music fades up. That's why, at the end of each year, we look back and we take stock.  We call this tradition "The Rest of the Story." And we bring you updates on the stories we've reported, and from the people we've met along the way. Today, we check in on an engineer and patent attorney who made a safer saw; we get an update o...

On the eve of Netflix shoveling a fourish-hour chunk of Stranger Things onto Christmas Day, we visit the past, present, and future of binge-dropped television shows.  The strategy of releasing an entire season at the same time has been key to taking Netflix from a little startup that used to lend us DVDs in the mail … to a company so big and powerful, it is maybe going to buy Warner Brothers and o...

As a country, we are spending more to get data centers up and running than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system. (Yes, that’s inflation-adjusted.) With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the US economy.  But along with that growth have come a lot of questions. Like where is all the electricity to run these...

Welcome to the inaugural Planet Money Pop Culture Draft! In today's episode (a Planet Money+ episode we’re releasing into the main feed) we're gonna go back to the year 1999. Three hosts, Kenny Malone, Wailin Wong, and Jeff Guo, go head to head and each drafts a “team” of economic pop culture. So a movie, a song, and a wild card pick that best represents the Planet Money spirit! It could be a movi...

In 2008, Chicago’s budget was in a bad place. The city needed money. One way to raise money was to increase property taxes, but what politician wants to do that? So instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration looked around at the resources the city had, and thought, ‘Any of this worth anything?’ They opted to lease out the city’s metered parking system — to privatize all 36,000 of its parking...

From nuclear fission to GPS to the internet, it’s common knowledge that many of the most resource intensive technologies of the last century got their start as military R&D projects in government-funded labs. But as Avery Trufelman explains in her fashion history podcast, Articles of Interest , the influence of the US military is, in many ways, even more intimate than that, shaping much of the clo...

A few years ago, the Jamaican government started making an unusual financial bet. It went to investors around the world asking if they'd like to wager on the chances a major hurricane would hit the island in the next couple of years.  In finance terms, these kinds of wagers are called "catastrophe bonds." They're a way to get investors to share the risk of a major disaster, whether that's a Japane...

Vote for us in NPR’s People’s Choice Awards: npr.org/peopleschoice   AI is already reshaping how people find work. Fewer entry-level jobs, robot recruiters, and ever-changing new skill requirements all add up to a new, daunting landscape for humans trying to find dignified work. Today on the show: two stories from the edges of a changing labor market. First we’ll assess claims that AI is causing a...

Taylor Swift reaches new heights with her latest album, which is both divisive and record-breaking. And it’s fueled by an elaborate series of business choices that propel profits but also chart numbers. Today’s episode comes from our friends at Today Explained , Vox’s lively, smart daily news podcast.  Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift . /  Support our show. Subscribe to Planet M...