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NPR: Planet Money PodcastMoney makes the world go around, faster and faster every day. On NPR's Planet Money, you'll meet high rollers, brainy economists and regular folks -- all trying to make sense of our rapidly changing global economy. Podcast, English, Seattle, USA |
| Listen now | #371: Where Dollar Bills Come From Every single dollar bill in the world — every $20, every $100, everything — is printed on paper made at one small mill in Massachusetts. That's been the case for 130 years.On today's show, we visit the mill. We hear the story of the guy who jumped... Tuesday, 15-May-12 22:11 BST |
| Listen now | #370: The Real Price Of College On today's show, we visit beautiful Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.Price of one year at Lafayette: $55,688. Up 63 percent from the price a decade ago.At least, that's the sticker price — the price you get if you add up tuition, room and... Friday, 11-May-12 22:19 BST |
| Listen now | #369: If Teens Ran The Fed We're in a gym full of high school students. The gym is at the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve, just a few blocks from Wall Street. The students are here for the High School Fed Challenge.If you're a high school student and you dream of... Wednesday, 09-May-12 02:35 BST |
| Listen now | #368: In A Leaderless World, Who Wins? Ian Bremmer calls his big idea "G-Zero." Here's how he described it in an essay last year:We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage or the will to drive a... Friday, 04-May-12 22:02 BST |
| Listen now | #367: A Broke Rapper, A Mystery Donor And An Empty House On today's show, we bring you three Planet Money radio stories:1. Pay Your Taxes: A Cautionary TaleWhen IRS agents raided the house of rapper Young Buck, they seized all his things: his white leather dining chairs, his watches, his craps table, his... Tuesday, 01-May-12 23:03 BST |
| Listen now | #366: How to Make It in the Food Truck Business In New York City, roughly 3,000 food trucks compete for the business of hungry office workers. Being in the right spot means the difference between fortune and ruin.There are many rules to finding that perfect parking space. Here are six of them:On... Saturday, 28-Apr-12 00:51 BST |
| Listen now | #365: We're Headed For A Fiscal Cliff. Should We Jump? Like most central bank chiefs, Ben Bernanke tends toward understatement. But when he testified before Congress earlier this year, Bernanke went big."On January 1, 2013," he said, "there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and... Tuesday, 24-Apr-12 22:01 BST |
| Listen now | #364: Cage Match: Coin Vs. Bill Legislation in Congress would get rid of dollar bills and replace them with coins. Proponents say coins are easier to use and save the country money in the long run. The bill people say none of this is true.Should we kill the dollar bill?On today's... Saturday, 21-Apr-12 00:09 BST |
| Listen now | #363: Why People Do Bad Things Traditionally, when we think about bad behavior, we think about character.But psychologists who study bad behavior — who study, say, fraud in the business world — have found that that character doesn't explain everything. They've found that a lot... Wednesday, 18-Apr-12 15:25 BST |
| Listen now | #362: Should Iceland Kill The Krona? Iceland has about as many people as Staten Island. It also has its own currency, the krona. This raises a question: Does it make sense to have a currency that's only used by 300,000 people?After the country's economy blew up in the financial crisis,... Friday, 13-Apr-12 22:31 BST |
| Listen now | #361: The Matzo Economy How do you make money manufacturing a dry, bland cracker that a tiny percentage of the population eats just one week a year?On today's show, we go inside the matzo business.A rabbi at a matzo factory explains why matzo is supposed to be hard to... Tuesday, 10-Apr-12 20:28 BST |
| Listen now | #360: Artisanal Jerky, High-Priced Nannies And Nancy Pelosi On today's show, we eat artisanal beef jerky, sort through the wreckage of the financial crisis, watch Nancy Pelosi raise money, and meet high priced nannies.It's is a collection of our recent radio stories. Here's more:A Revival In American... Friday, 06-Apr-12 21:05 BST |
| Listen now | #359: He Tried To Save A Broke City. Then He Disappeared. David Unkovic is a thoughtful, mild-mannered guy who was appointed to save Harrisburg, Pa. The city had gone broke, and it was Unkovic's job to figure out how to fix things.We visited Harrisburg a few weeks back. We talked to Unkovic. We talked to... Wednesday, 04-Apr-12 02:37 BST |
| Listen now | #358: I'm Calling To Ask For Your Contribution If you serve in Congress, you have two jobs: Making laws, and raising money to run for re-election.It turns out, that second job — raising money to run for re-election — is a lot easier if you serve on certain Congressional committees.On today's... Friday, 30-Mar-12 23:17 BST |
| Listen now | #357: What A 16th Century Guild Teaches Us About Competition On today's show, we hear the story of a 16th century German weavers' guild. They were savvy political operators, who knew how to push their competitors out of the market. They set up a system of fines, wage ceilings, and public rebukes that would be... Wednesday, 28-Mar-12 01:30 BST |
| Listen now | #356: The Surprisingly Entertaining History Of The Income Tax The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income tax. For most of American history, there was no income tax at all. At one point it was ruled unconstitutional.Today, income tax is the federal government's main source of revenue. That raises a... Friday, 23-Mar-12 23:26 GMT |
| Listen now | #355: The 14-Year-Old Who Bought A House Willow Tufano is a 14-year-old girl who recently bought a house in Florida for $12,000.Willow and her mom split the cost of the house, which they're now renting out. Willow saved up money by selling stuff from foreclosed homes on Craigslist; she plans... Wednesday, 21-Mar-12 00:20 GMT |
| Listen now | #354: A Former Mortgage Exec Speaks Out On today's show, we talk with a former manager at Countrywide Financial. Cynder Niemela describes what life was like inside the giant mortgage lender back in 2006. It's not pretty.Mike Hudson, an investigative reporter with the Center For Public... Friday, 16-Mar-12 21:05 GMT |
| Listen now | #353: How Europe Saved Itself. For Now. Today's show, in three bullet points:How the European Central Bank finally used its super power.What that has to do with a guy who owns a bar on the coast of Spain.And why this may not be the end of Europe's debt saga. Wednesday, 14-Mar-12 02:05 GMT |
| Listen now | #352: The High-Tech Cow On today's show, we visit Fulper Farms, a family-run dairy in New Jersey. It's a bucolic setting — white farmhouse, rolling hills, etc. But behind that peaceful image lies all the roiling tension, rising inequality and economic volatility of the... Saturday, 10-Mar-12 02:24 GMT |
| Listen now | #351: What Mormons Can Teach The IRS The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that each Mormon in good standing should tithe 10 percent of his or her income."That's written in stone, and preached from the pulpit," says Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of... Wednesday, 07-Mar-12 01:34 GMT |
| Listen now | #350: China's Giant Pool Of Money Today on the show, we visit a giant pool of money — worth trillions of U.S. dollars! — at the—People's Bank of China, the country's central bank.To understand how the money got there, we talk to Jacky Jiang and Rosalia Yang, a pair of very... Saturday, 03-Mar-12 02:21 GMT |
| Listen now | #349: Private Equity, Explained Today, in the second of our two-part series on private equity, we take another look at Bain Capital — the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney.Last Tuesday, in the first part of the series, we looked at a deal Bain did during Romney's tenure that went... Wednesday, 29-Feb-12 05:29 GMT |
| Listen now | #348: 'History Is A Battle Between Creditors And Debtors' "History is a battle between creditors and debtors," Philip Coggan says on today's show. "Every so often these two clash, there is a crisis and the whole system is remade."Coggan, who writes the Buttonwood column for the Economist, is author of the... Saturday, 25-Feb-12 05:13 GMT |
| Listen now | #347: What Do Private Equity Firms Actually Do? Are private-equity firms job-destroying monsters? Or are they knights in shining armor, riding in to fix troubled companies and make the economy work better?When you have a presidential candidate who used to run a private-equity firm, the arguments... Wednesday, 22-Feb-12 02:57 GMT |
| Listen now | #346: Is China's Economy Genius, Or Bound For Disaster? When you walk around a big city in China, it feels like an entrepreneurial free-for-all — guys selling stuff on street corners, lots of little shops, everybody hustling.But when you pull back the curtain on the country's economy, you find the... Friday, 17-Feb-12 22:43 GMT |
| Listen now | #227: Lighthouses, Autopsies And The Federal Budget What should the government pay for?On today's Planet Money, we pose that question to Charlie Wheelan, author of the book Naked Economics, and one-time Congressional candidate. (He lost).He gives us the econ 101 answer: The government should... Wednesday, 15-Feb-12 00:24 GMT |
| Listen now | #345: Genius Ideas On today's show: Four genius ideas.These ideas, as it happens, have all appeared in Planet Money radio stories. But they've never been on the podcast.A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan.Rethinking The Oreo For Chinese ConsumersWhat Do The Dow's... Friday, 10-Feb-12 22:54 GMT |
| Listen now | #344: Can We Create Banks We Love? Can we have a banking system that provides good services to people at reasonable rates? A banking system that doesn't bring down the global economy every few decades?Anat Admati thinks we can. She's a finance professor at Stanford, but she never paid... Wednesday, 08-Feb-12 00:47 GMT |
| Listen now | #343: Super Bowl Economics This is what it's like to host the Super Bowl: For one weekend, your city is the focus of the sporting universe. Fans flock in droves. They eat at your restaurants and sleep in your hotels. They buy the "I ♥ [your city]" t-shirts.♥The NFL... Friday, 03-Feb-12 23:07 GMT |
| Listen now | #342: The App Economy On today's show, we hear how a hobby turns into a lucrative one-man business — and how Apple's App Store is transforming the Internet economy.The gist is super simple. In fact, it's something that's been going on in the physical world for thousands... Wednesday, 01-Feb-12 00:36 GMT |
| Listen now | #341: A Former Lobbyist Tells All On the podcast today, we get a glimpse from inside the room where money changes hands. Jimmy Williams used to lobby for the powerful National Association of Realtors.Williams tells us about some of the ridiculous issues he's lobbied for, the steady... Friday, 27-Jan-12 23:26 GMT |
| Listen now | #340: Who Loaned Money To Greece, Anyway? It's the 11th hour for Europe's debt crisis. Again.Greece still can't pay back all the money it owes. So it's trying to cut a deal with its creditors. (Again.)We've been wondering for years: Who are the people who loaned money to Greece? Are they... Wednesday, 25-Jan-12 00:22 GMT |
| Listen now | #339: Katy Perry's Perfect Year Katy Perry killed it on the pop charts last year. She went No.1 five times. She was the most played artist on the radio. But the record industry is so weird, it's hard to know whether this kind of success translates into huge amounts of money for her... Saturday, 21-Jan-12 02:47 GMT |
| Listen now | #338: Do Sanctions Work? It seems like there's always some country or another that the United States is imposing sanctions on. The reasons change, but the idea is always the same: economic coercion.This month, it's Iran. In response to Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear... Wednesday, 18-Jan-12 03:49 GMT |
| Listen now | #337:The Secret Document That Transformed China In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut.They were afraid the document might get them executed. Instead, it wound up completely transforming the Chinese economy.On... Saturday, 14-Jan-12 00:47 GMT |
| Listen now | #336: The Past And Future Of American Manufacturing American manufacturing is dead, right? Not exactly. The dollar value of what we make here keeps going up and up. But the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. The number of manufacturing jobs in this country has collapsed as factories... Wednesday, 11-Jan-12 04:21 GMT |
| Listen now | #335: Who Killed Lard? You rarely see lard on menus. There aren't shelves and shelves of it in every supermarket. In this country, we've sort of lost touch with the once beloved pig fat.On today's podcast, we ask — who killed lard? Was it Upton Sinclair? His novel, The... Saturday, 07-Jan-12 02:41 GMT |
| Listen now | #334 A Good Year For . . . Sometimes it feels like all we talk about at Planet Money is how the economy is going down the tubes. Not today. We visit a few people who have been doing well this year. There's a guy who buys and stores gold for investors, companies that sell off... Friday, 30-Dec-11 23:43 GMT |
| Listen now | #333: 'The Rest Of The Story' On today's podcast, we take a page from radio newscaster Paul Harvey and tell you "the rest of the story."We look back at the podcasts we've done in 2011 and tell you what we got right, what we got wrong and how everything turned out in Wisconsin and... Tuesday, 27-Dec-11 21:55 GMT |
| Listen now | #238: Why Economists Hate Gifts Giving and receiving gifts can be a joyful thing — unless you're an economist. All those books that will never be read and ties that will never be worn are hugely inefficient.To investigate a possible solution, we went to a seventh-grade classroom... Friday, 23-Dec-11 22:24 GMT |
| Listen now | #332: Jack Abramoff On Lobbying Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist, is out of prison and available for interviews. On today's show we talk to him — not about his crimes, but about the legal kind of lobbying that goes on every day. And we find out, how much do companies benefit... Wednesday, 21-Dec-11 03:48 GMT |
| Listen now | #331: How Office Politics Could Take Down Europe If you're looking for the beginning — and, possibly, the end — of the European financial crisis, you can find it in a single building: The Greek statistics office, at 46 Peireos Street in Athens.We visited recently and found what may be the... Friday, 16-Dec-11 23:03 GMT |
| Listen now | #330: Dollar Coins Are Done Earlier this year we reported on the pileup of more than a billion unwanted $1 coins in government vaults. It was the result of a law passed a few years back that ordered the mint to create coins honoring each U.S. president.Today, the White House... Wednesday, 14-Dec-11 00:41 GMT |
| Listen now | #329: The 'Nasty, Rotten' Airline Business Last week, American Airlines became a member of a club it hoped never to be a part of — major airlines that have declared bankruptcy. Before American came Pan Am, Delta, United, Northwest, US Airways, and Continental.Sure, fuel costs are high and... Saturday, 10-Dec-11 00:27 GMT |
| Listen now | #328: Europe Turns On The Bat Signal European governments have turned their eyes skyward looking for a hero to save them from financial collapse. But the signal they've sent into the skies over Europe is not the usual one in the shape of a bat, it's the initials E-C-B, the European... Wednesday, 07-Dec-11 01:27 GMT |
| Listen now | #327: A Holiday Shopping Spree On today's show, we go shopping. We're bringing you stories about how we spend our money and what these purchases teach us about economics.Why Amazon Loses Money On Every Kindle Fire: The Kindle Fire is a book store, a movie theater and a record shop.... Saturday, 03-Dec-11 02:38 GMT |
| Listen now | #326: Why Does A Taxi Medallion Cost $1 Million? Last month here in New York City, two taxi medallions, the metal plates that make it legal to dive a cab in the city, sold for $1 million each.On today's podcast, we try to answer the question — why? What makes these little pieces of metal worth so... Tuesday, 29-Nov-11 22:48 GMT |
| Listen now | #325: Housing, Weddings, Space, Bacon For today's show, we've collected four Planet Money radio stories that never made it to the podcast. Think of it as an early Thanksgiving buffet:What A Coin Toss Has To Do With The Housing Market — A simple experiment helps explain why there's still... Tuesday, 22-Nov-11 21:35 GMT |
| Listen now | #324: A Financial Adviser Bets The House Financial planner Carl Richards tells us how he got sucked into the financial mess just like the rest of us and shares what it taught him. Saturday, 19-Nov-11 01:36 GMT |
| Listen now | #322: Boom Town Nevada's an economic disaster zone, with the nation's highest rate of both unemployment and foreclosures. But a few towns strung along I-80 in the middle of nowhere are doing great.The reason: They're in the middle of Nevada's gold mining country,... Saturday, 12-Nov-11 00:17 GMT |
| Listen now | #321: Kill The Euro, Win $400,000 On today's show, we talk to a guy named Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise. He's a British CEO, and he's offering a $400,000 prize to the person who comes up with the best plan for countries to leave the euro.Also: The story of another European currency... Tuesday, 08-Nov-11 23:18 GMT |
| Listen now | #320: How Fear Turned A Surplus Into Scarcity Today on the podcast, the story of one of the most destructive and mysterious food shortages in recent memory. The most mysterious thing about this shortage of rice: There was more than enough to go around.It is the epic story of a shortage that... Friday, 04-Nov-11 22:07 GMT |
| Listen now | #319: Inside Washington's Money Machine On today's show, we go inside the rooms in Washington where the daily grind of campaign finance — Congressmen, lobbyists, money — takes place. At least, we try to go inside the rooms. Several times.And we talk to Jimmy Williams, a former lobbyist... Wednesday, 02-Nov-11 02:11 GMT |
