Planet Money
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SubscribersEver wondered why you can buy fresh Peruvian blueberries in the dead of winter? The answer, surprisingly, is tied to cocaine. Today on the show, we look at how the War on Drugs led to an American trad...
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- 2 weeks ago
27:57
What are tariffs good for?For years, mainstream economists have basically said: tariffs are not good. They are an import tax paid by consumers, they've said, and they discourage free trade, and we wan...
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- 3 weeks ago
23:28
The deal seemed too good to be true. There's a website that's been selling top quality diamonds at bizarrely low prices. Prices we couldn't find at any retail outlet. Prices so low, we could buy a dia...
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- 4 weeks ago
32:22
If you cut every single federal job President Donald Trump wants to cut, how much money would that save? A president has tried to massively shrink the size of the federal government before. It was in ...
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- 1 month ago
27:20
In some ways, starting a bank is a lot like starting any other business. Who will you hire? Where will you be located? What color will the couches be? But it's also way more complicated. There are ton...
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- 1 month ago
25:52
Memecoins are having a moment. Everyone from Hawk Tuah to President Donald Trump to animal influencers like Moo Deng the pygmy hippo have been turned into cryptocurrency. But what are the costs of all...
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- 1 month ago
34:44
What do Moo Deng the pygmy hippo, social media sensation Hawk Tuah, and the President of the United States all have in common? They've all inspired highly valuable, highly volatile memecoins. The humb...
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- 1 month ago
28:11
There has been chaotic uncertainty around billions of dollars allocated by Congress. The Trump administration ordered a pause on — and review of — certain types of federal assistance. A judge blocked ...
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- 2 months ago
25:52
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 carg...
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- 2 months ago
23:29
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, t...
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- 2 months ago
29:42
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 ma...
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- 2 months ago
26:41
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 avail...
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- 2 months ago
17:49
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 dai...
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- 3 months ago
28:14
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 machine...
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- 3 months ago
27:54
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, Gr...
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- 3 months ago
17:12
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...
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- 3 months ago
28:29
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 ...
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- 3 months ago
22:20
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, a...
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- 4 months ago
33:02
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 ...
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- 4 months ago
30:15
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 c...
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- 4 months ago
28:29
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, ...
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- 4 months ago
26:32
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 g...
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- 4 months ago
31:17
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...
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- 4 months ago
30:40
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 ...
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- 4 months ago
20:09
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 e...
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- 4 months ago
26:15
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 "lotter...
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- 5 months ago
28:55
This is the story behind one of the most valuable — and perhaps, most improbable — technologies humanity has ever created. It's a breakthrough called extreme ultraviolet lithography, and it's how the ...
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- 5 months ago
26:42
Back in the 90s, the federal government ran a bold experiment, giving people vouchers to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. They wanted to test if housing policy could be ho...
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- 5 months ago
23:59
Ray and Becky Queen live in rural Oklahoma with their kids (and chickens). The Queens were able to buy that home with a VA loan because of Ray's service in the Army. During COVID, the Queens – like mi...
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- 5 months ago
36:48
If you... exist in the world, it's likely that you have gotten a letter or email at some point informing you that your data was stolen. This happened recently to potentially hundreds of millions of pe...
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- 5 months ago
28:59
There's something strange going on in hospitals. Cheap, common drugs that nurses use every day seem to be constantly hit by shortages. These are often generic drugs that don't seem super complicated t...
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- 5 months ago
26:27
On today's show, we have two stories from The Indicator, Planet Money's daily podcast. They just launched Love Week, a weeklong series exploring the business and economic side of romance.First, hosts ...
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- 6 months ago
17:28
Over the past two decades, there's been a sort of tectonic economic shift happening under our feet. More and more companies have switched from selling goods one by one to selling services, available a...
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- 6 months ago
30:55
(For our story on this year's Nobel in Economics, check out our daily show, The Indicator!)Let's face it. Economics is filled with terms that don't always make sense to the average person. Terms that ...
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- 6 months ago
21:23
Even in our modern world with planes and jets and drones, the vast majority of goods are moved around the planet in cargo ships. Which means our ports are the backbone of our global economy. The longs...
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- 6 months ago
25:51
Recently, the state of Washington embarked on an ambitious new plan to combat climate change. Taking a page from economics textbooks, the state instituted a statewide "cap and trade" system for carbon...
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- 6 months ago
24:05
The lawyer commercial is almost an art form unto itself. Learned practitioners of the law doing whatever it takes to get your attention, from impressive dirt bike stunts to running around half naked. ...
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- 6 months ago
18:54
(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016.)Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn't have enough food. Hospitals didn't have basic supplies, like gauze. Ch...
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- 6 months ago
23:09
"Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy."That is the bold promise in Planet Money's tagline. And we believe the show does live up to it. Over the last year, we've t...
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- 6 months ago
25:59
Next week, JD Vance and Tim Walz will face off in the only confirmed vice presidential debate ahead of the election. As voters look ahead to what their economic policies might be, we look back to see ...
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- 6 months ago
25:05
Table saws are extremely dangerous. The government estimates that injuries from table saws send something like 30,000 people to the emergency room every year. 3,000 of those end in amputations. The co...
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- 7 months ago
24:28
People often say that money can't buy you happiness. Sometimes, if you ask them to tell you more about it, they'll mention a famous 2010 study by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. ...
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- 7 months ago
28:48
Today we have a guest episode from 99 Percent Invisible.It is about White Castle, the burger chain. Even if you haven't visited, you have tasted its influence because, as we will learn in this episode...
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- 7 months ago
32:43
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to get inflation under control. One side effect is that taking out a mortgage to buy a home has gotten very expensive. That's especially a problem for some ho...
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- 7 months ago
23:13
Are the promises made by AI boosters all hype, or are we actually under-appreciating the transformative potential of AI?Can artificial intelligence make humans more productive, unlock hidden potential...
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- 7 months ago
18:50
Summer camp is a classic rite of passage in the U.S. It's a place of self-discovery, where kids come to make new friends and take on new challenges. But what if it were ALSO a place where children cam...
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- 7 months ago
33:32
Campaigns can be a jargony slog. And this year, we are seeing a lot of economic terms being thrown around, many of which... aren't entirely straightforward.In this episode, we try to make the mess of ...
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- 7 months ago
29:14
When Cody Fischer decided to get into real estate development, he had a vision. He wanted to build affordable, energy efficient apartments in Minneapolis, not far from where he grew up.His vision was ...
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- 7 months ago
23:29
Take the 2024 Planet Money Summer School Quiz here to earn your personalized diploma!Find all the episodes from this season of Summer School here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok her...
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- 7 months ago
32:48
When David Rashid took over US autoparts maker Plews and Edelmann, the company was losing business to its Chinese rival, Qingdao Sunsong. Both companies make power steering hoses, but Sunsong was offe...
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- 8 months ago
26:43
Description
Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy. At Planet Money, we explore the forces that shape our lives and bring you along for the ride. Don't just understand the economy – understand the world.Wanna go deeper? Subscribe to Planet Money+ and get sponsor-free episodes of Planet Money, The Indicator, and Planet Money Summer School. Plus access to bonus content. It's a new way to support the show you love. Learn more at plus.npr.org/planetmoney
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