Planet Money

The San Jose was a marvel of 17th century technology. The Spanish galleon weighed more than a thousand tons, was made of wood reinforced with iron, and featured three masts and 64 cannons. In its cargo were gold, silver, silk and porcelain. But in 1708, it sank after a battle with an English ship near what is now Colombia. For centuries, the shipwreck was the stuff of legends, until 2015 when unde...

Americans spend more on scratch lottery tickets per year than on pizza. More than all Coca-Cola products. Yet the scratch ticket as a consumer item has only existed for fifty years. Not so long ago, the idea of an instant lottery, of gambling with a little sheet of paper, was strange. Scary, even. So, how did scratch lotteries go from an idea that states wanted nothing to do with, to a commonplace...

On Monday, the stock market went into a tizzy over a new AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek. It seemed to be just as powerful as many of its American competitors, but its makers claimed to have made it far more cheaply, using far less computing power than similar AI apps like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. In one day, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the valuations of companies rela...

When it comes to solar and wind power, renewable energy has always had a caveat: it can only run when the wind blows or the sun shines. The idea of a battery was floated around to make renewables available 24/7. For years, it existed as an expensive, little-used technology. Then in 2021, it took off. In this episode, we explore how this new energy market works in two states: California and Texas....

After being sworn into office, President Trump signed a whole host of executive actions and orders that affirm his campaign promise to crack down on immigration. Trump's border czar has said Chicago is at the top of the list of places to be targeted. The city is expecting immigration raids, detentions and deportations. In the Little Village neighborhood, where the majority of residents are Mexican...

The fires in Los Angeles are almost out. Residents are starting to trickle back into their burned-out neighborhoods. When they get to their houses, they face a series of almost impossible questions: Do we want to live here amongst all this destruction? And if we do, how do we even start? Today, we meet a father and son from Altadena who are confronting those choices. We pass through the National G...

Donald Trump is just about to begin his second presidency. And it may be safe to say that every single person in America has at least one question about what's to come in the next four years. So, we thought we'd try to answer your questions — as best we can — about the economics of a second Trump term. Is now the time to shop for new tech? Can Trump actually bring down grocery and oil prices? And,...

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2018 .) Is it really cheaper to shop at an airport Duty Free store? And why are so many of them alike? In the 1940s, if you were flying from New York City to London or Paris you would find yourself making a pit stop for fuel on the western coast of Ireland. The Shannon airport at the time wasn't much to look at, but the passengers arriving there were movie sta...

You know Watergate, but do you know Fedgate? The more subtle scandal with more monetary policy and, arguably, much higher stakes. In today's episode, we listen back through the Nixon White House tapes to search for evidence of an alarming chapter in American economic history: When the President of the United States seemingly flouted the norms of Fed Independence in order to pressure the Chair of t...

The ZIP code is less like a cold, clinical, ordered list of numbers, and more like a weird overgrown number garden. It started as a way to organize mail after WWII, but now it pops up all over our daily lives. You type it into the machine at the gas station to verify your credit card. You might type it into a rental search website if you're looking for a new apartment. Back in 2013, the ZIP Code c...

Ever since free trade opened up between the US and Mexico in the 1990s, trillions of dollars of goods have been going back and forth between the two countries, from cars to strawberries to MRI machines to underwear. But one major exception has been fresh American potatoes. Today on the show, we tell the trade saga of the American potato. For more than 25 years, there was a place that American pota...

If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn't think AI is quite there... yet. In this interview, Greg Rosalsky talks with Luis about AI and how it's reshaping translation jobs and the language learning industry. We also ask him about headlines earlier this year suggesting Duolingo laid off some of...

After the gift exchange comes another great holiday tradition: returns season. Once again, we are joining the fun in our own Planet Money way. We are returning to stories from years past to see what's changed since we last reported them. It's an episode we call The Rest of the Story. We have updates on zombie mortgages, student loan forgiveness, Argentina's economy under its self-described anarcho...

This year, there was some economic good news to go around. Inflation generally ticked down. Unemployment more or less held around 4-percent. Heck, the Fed even cut interest rates three times. But for a lot of people, the overall economic vibes were more important. And the vibes... were still off. We might have achieved the soft landing the Fed was hoping for, but we saw some wackiness in the relat...

Our planet is in serious trouble. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction, and the biggest cause is companies destroying their habitats to farm food, mine minerals, and otherwise get the raw materials to turn into the products we all consume. So, when Mauricio Serna was in college, he realized his family's plot of land in Colombia, called El Globo , presented a un...

Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. So in the 1980s, when computers and deep statistical analysis entered the markets, it also entered the sportsbooks and changed the world of sports gambling in ways we see every day now. On today's episode, we have a story from Micha...

Why do some nations fail and others succeed? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how economists think about global inequality. Their work centered on a powerful — and almost radically obvious — idea: that the economic fate of nations is determined by how societies organize themselves. In other words, the economists shined a spotlight on...

The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them? Today on the show, we tell the nearly 100-year-old story of Smoot and Hawley, that explains why Congress decided to delegate tariff power to the executive branch in the first place. It's a story that weaves in wool, humble buckwheat, tiny little goldfish, and even Ferris Buell...

Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local office in South Lafourche partnered with the federal government's Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive ring of earthen mounds – also known as levees – to keep the floodwaters at bay. But after Hurricane Katrina called into question the integrity of...

As people learn more about Donald Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, one story comes up over and over: a legendary trade that he played a small part in while he worked at George Soros' hedge fund in the 1990s. In 1992, Soros' fund set its sights on the British pound, betting that some time in the fall of that year, the pound would plummet in value. Opposing them in this trade was...

The dreaded data breach notification... It tells you your personal data's been compromised and suggests steps you can take to minimize the potential harm. On today's episode, Kenny Malone pulls out a data breach letter he received and goes over what it recommends with Amanda Aronczyk. Amanda recently did a show about the legal and illegal markets for data and tells us how useful these steps actual...

You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought it. Because it was comfy. Or blue. Or the right price. But what if the style, the color, the cost, maybe even whether you would like it, were choices made for you years before you even thought about buying that piece of furniture. Today on the show: The city that makes or breaks the furniture world. We tr...

A couple years ago, Gina Leto, a real estate developer, bought a property with her business partner. The process went like it usually did: Lots of paperwork; a virtual closing. Pretty cut-and-dry. Gina and her partner started building a house on the property. But $800,000 into the construction process, Gina got a troubling call from her lawyer. There was something wrong. At first, Gina thought the...

Mass deportations. What would actually happen—economically—if the President-elect follows through on promises to deport millions of people from America. We don't have to guess. Today we have two stories from Planet Money's daily podcast, The Indicator. First, the story from another time the US cracked down on immigration with the expressed intent of helping the economy. We look at how that worked...

Every ten years, a group of German farmers gather in the communal farm fields of the Osing for the Osingverlosung , a ritual dating back centuries. Osing refers to the area. And verlosung means "lottery," as in a land lottery. All of the land in this communal land is randomly reassigned to farmers who commit to farming it for the next decade. Hundreds of years ago, a community in Germany came up w...