Planet Money

Tariffs. They’ve been announced, unannounced, re-announced, raised and lowered. It’s an on-going saga with billions at stake!On today’s episode, we run full-on at the twisty, turny drama of life with broad-based tariffs and tackle perhaps our most asked question: Are we, regular U.S. shoppers, feeling the tariffs yet? When we’re at the grocery store or the coffee shop, are we paying more for things because of the tariffs?We now have the data to get a very clear answer to that question. Plus, we hear a cautionary tale from our...

Last month, during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the United States had offered to functionally loan Argentina $20 billion. Despite the sums involved, this bailout required no authorization from Congress, because of the loan’s source: an obscure pool of money called the Exchange Stabilization Fund. The ESF is essentially the Treasury Department’s private slush fund. Its history goes all the way back to the Great Depression. But, in the 90 years since its creation, it has only been used one time at this scale to bailout an emerging econo...

(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2022.)Every time you shop online and make it to the checkout screen, you see those colorful pastel buttons at the bottom. Affirm. Klarna. Afterpay. Asking: Do you want to split your payment into interest-free installments? No credit check needed. Get what you want, right now. That temptation got shoppers like Amelia Schmarzo into some money trouble. Back in 2022, she maxed out her credit card after a month of buying now and paying later. She’s not alone. Buy now, pay later is everywhere now. And you can...

When people in Maine prisons started getting laptops to use in their cells for online classes and homework, it sparked this new idea. Could they have laptops in their cells to work remotely for real outside world jobs, too??? And get real outside world wages?Today on the show, we have reporting from Maine Public Radio’s Susan Sharon about a new experiment in prisons: remote jobs … paying fair market wages, for people who are incarcerated. Listen to Susan’s original reporting here:  - In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs and...

People in the U.S. are feeling the financial squeeze, in part because of rising inflation, higher consumer prices and slowing job growth. The Indicator from Planet Money is tackling a special series on the rising cost of living. Today, two stories from that series. First, what’s making ticket prices go up? We look at the economics behind the ticket market and how “reseller bots” are wreaking all sorts of havoc. The industry is not a fan, and yet they do serve an economic function. And… why pet care costs have surged. It comes down to unique...

This week’s SNAP crisis is just a preview. Tucked inside the giant tax-cut and spending bill signed by President Donald Trump this summer are enormous cuts to SNAP: Who qualifies, how much they get, and who foots the bill for the program. That last part is a huge change.For the entire history of the food stamp program, the federal government has paid for all the benefits that go out. States pay part of the cost of administering it, but the food stamp money has come entirely from federal taxpayers. This bill shifts part of the costs to...

For decades, the U.S. has been the single biggest source of remittances worldwide. A remittance is a transfer of money, typically from an immigrant to their family in their country of origin. But we are in the middle of a big, loud and very public immigration crackdown on those who are here without legal status. And that crackdown is disrupting the global remittance market. People who have come to the U.S. from a handful of countries — especially some Central American countries — have been sending more money back to their countries of origin. And it’s a bit of a...

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 run an air taxi service in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 2012, police caught one of Ken’s passengers with a six-pack of Budweiser in her luggage. Over that six-pack, Ken was convic...

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 possibly the most successful audio branding campaigns in history. It’s a tale of guerilla marketing and the power of sonic suggestion.Pre-order the Planet Money book, and get a free gift / S...

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 sanctioned oil out of Russia … with near impunity. Today on the show, how those ships are transforming the global oil market and fueling the war in...

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 garbage piled up in the streets.Rescuing the city required the cooperation of the state of New York, the banks, the city workers unions, giant property owners an...

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 part because, in recent years, there’s a new buyer at the table: hedge funds, those loosely-regulated financial companies that invest on behalf of institutions and wealth...

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’re adapting defenses, and find out how the new defenses are a game of AI vs AI. Then, we move over to the stock market to witne...

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 gameSubmit your feedback on the gameWatch the how-to video with Kenny and Elan for playtest instructionsIn this episode, the story of how we arrived here. Ride along as our game-making partners at Exploding Kittens help us turn our (sometimes wild) economics game ideas into the next blockbuster game. It’s a behind the scenes look at how to design a game from scratch —...

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 more like 5,000. Just a handful of those get to be hits. In the first episode of our new ser...

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 at home. And it’s one of the great achievements of the modern world. On today’s show, Nicola Twilley, food journalist and author of Frostbite: How Refrig...

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 attention of competitors and regulatory agencies, destabilized billions of dollars worth of trades, and called into question some of the most fundamental strategies in global finance. Some Planet Money...

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 there are no functioning banks or ATMs? And almost no electricity. And spotty internet. And what is there...

(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 Clinton's campaign promises, and Silicon Valley workers taking to the streets to protest an accounting rule. And of course, D...

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 tangled up with businesses like this. Some have accused the president of taking a step toward, well, socialism.But the Intel deal didn’t come out of nowhere. It's actually the l...