Planet Money

By NPR

Business

What's Planet Money about?

The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, "Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy." Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.

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LAST EPISODE

The World's Biggest Battery...

01.27.2021

California has a ton of solar power. But as soon as night falls, it's gone. Today on the show: how to bottle the sun

Planet Money episodes:

01.27.2021 The World's Biggest Battery (Classic) California has a ton of solar power. But as soon as night falls, it's gone. Today on the show: how to bottle the sun
01.23.2021 How Desi Invented Television The television was invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927. TV was invented by Desi Arnaz in 1951.
01.20.2021 Modern Monetary Theory (Classic) We rethink everything we know about government spending, taxes, and the nature of money.
01.16.2021 The Great Gatsby All of it. Read by the staff of Planet Money.
01.14.2021 Nervous TikTok The U.S. was going to ban TikTok... and then it didn't. We break down the beef with TikTok, and see what life would have been like without it. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.11.2021 Planet Monet (Classic) Investors are pouring money into art, but a lot of it is disappearing into storage. We find out why. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.08.2021 The Bees Go To California (Classic) Almonds taste great. And the logistics behind pollinating almond trees are un-bee-lievable. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.07.2021 Chaos At The Capitol With an insurrection at the Capitol, we interrupt Planet Money and turn the feed over to tonight's episode of the NPR Politics podcast. \| Subscribe to Planet Money's weekly newsletter here.
01.01.2021 Bitcoin Losers (Classic) The Bitcoin market is still crazy, but a lot of people can't even find their Bitcoins. We go looking for lost billions. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.30.2020 The Rest Of The Story, 2020 We check in on The Fed, a vaccine scientist, and the mixed martial arts. Oh, and a bunch of escheaters. So long, 2020! \| Support our show here.
12.25.2020 How To Stop An Asteroid (UPDATE) Some smart people say we should be doing more to protect the Earth from asteroids. The technical issues are relatively easy. The economics? Much harder.
12.24.2020 Fork The Government A global pandemic might not be the best time to try something new with technology. But Taiwan decided to do it anyway. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.19.2020 The Mixtape Drama Mixtapes were the heart of hip-hop culture in the 90s. Until an arrest in 2007 brought it all down. \| Today's episode is from our friends at Louder Than a Riot.
12.17.2020 The Case Against Facebook The government just filed one of the largest antitrust cases in history against Facebook. Why now? And what will it mean? \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.11.2020 We Buy A Lot Of Christmas Trees Nick and Robert head to the world's largest Christmas tree auction with $1,000 and a truck. And get schooled in the tree market. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.10.2020 The Stolen Company (Classic) When an American company named ABRO learns their goods are being counterfeited in China, they start their own trade war. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.05.2020 How The Rat Blew Up Unions have been putting giant inflatable rats in front of businesses for years. Now businesses are trying to deflate them, in court. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.03.2020 Before The Shot In The Arm Inventing a vaccine for COVID-19 was hard, but getting billions of doses to billions of people is going to be even harder. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.27.2020 Hot Dog Hail Mary (Classic) The Falcons are trying something radical: Making their food cheaper. It could break stadium economics.
11.25.2020 Swamp Gravy (UPDATE) Colquitt, Georgia, was struggling. And then musical theater came along. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.21.2020 All Your Genes Are Belong To Us Who owns your genes, anyway? For a while, Big Biotech patented 20% of the human genome. Then a lawyer took them to the Supreme Court. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.18.2020 Trade Show (UPDATE) It's been a rough four years for free trade. Today on the show, we present 244 years of trade in 22 minutes. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.13.2020 Biden Time Four things Joe Biden can do as president — even if the Democrats don't control Congress. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.11.2020 Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (Classic) One of the few things a new president has a lot of control over is tariff policies. But it wasn't always that way. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.06.2020 Hacking The Perfect Auction A Nobel-Prize winner spent years designing an auction to sell off the airwaves, which are owned by the public. But Wall Street found a tiny flaw. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.04.2020 What's Next for the Economy? A research group at Harvard came up with a faster way to check the economy's pulse. It may change how we fight recessions. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.30.2020 What Economy Are You Voting For? Two candidates. Two very different ways of thinking about the economy. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.28.2020 Who Gets To Vote In Florida? Angel Sanchez was 17 and in prison when he learned felons couldn't vote in Florida. When he got out, he tried to change that. It was working – until money got involved.\| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.23.2020 Frame Canada For years, Wendell Potter ran a campaign to terrify Americans... about health care in Canada. Now he explains how he did it, and why. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.22.2020 Hey Google, Are You Too Big? The government just filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. In this episode, we talk about why, and why it matters. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.16.2020 Opening Schools And Other Hard Decisions Emily Oster wanted to understand the risks of opening schools. So she started a massive data collection campaign. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.14.2020 Caste Arrives In Silicon Valley For some Indian employees of big U.S. tech companies, caste discrimination is real. To combat it, first people have to talk about it. That's hard. \| Today's episode is from our friends at Rough Translation.
10.09.2020 Political Ad Nauseam It's presidential election season, and that means it's political ad season. But who do ads target, anyway? \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.07.2020 Rethinking Black Wealth Homes in Black neighborhoods are valued lower than homes in white neighborhoods. Why? This episode, Dr. Andre Perry flips the narrative of the racial wealth gap. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.02.2020 Call Center Call Out We visit life on the other side of your customer service call and get a glimpse into the troubling future of work in America. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.01.2020 Trump's Tiny Taxes A totally refreshing 20 minutes or so of infotainment related to Trump, taxes and toy wooden arrows. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
09.25.2020 Sell Me Your Climate Bombs There's this greenhouse gas out there that's thousands of times more dangerous than carbon dioxide, lurking in garages and sheds all over the country.
09.23.2020 REDMAP (Update) The result of national elections is shaped in a big and underappreciated way by very local elections. This is the story of the man who shaped many, many local elections to tip the national scales. \| Subscribe to our weekly ...
09.18.2020 Apple v Everybody When Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney sued Apple over its App Store, it started a war about antitrust and the internet.
09.16.2020 After The Plague The Black Death was one of the worst catastrophes to ever hit humanity. But it also helped redistribute wealth and make daily life better for a lot of medieval Europeans.
09.11.2020 Waste Land For 30 years, oil companies convinced the public that all their plastic trash could be, and would be, recycled, when they knew it wasn't true.
09.09.2020 We Buy A Junk Bond Team Indicator buys Cardiff a surprise present. A terrible, extremely risky, but wildly interesting investment. Then it gets interesting. The company that issued the junk bond declared bankruptcy. But that wasn't the end of the story. \| Subscribe to our ...
09.05.2020 The Murderer, The Boy King, And The Invention Of Modern Finance John Law killed a man in a duel, brought the first paper money to France, and became one of the richest people in the world. Then it all collapsed.
09.02.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL: Graduation! Summer School graduates take the stage to show us how we can all see our everyday world through the beautiful lens of economics. \| Take the final exam and get your diploma here.
09.01.2020 Your Brain On Retail Trading Stock-picking retail traders have been jumping into the market this year. They may not understand the risks.
08.28.2020 The Old Rules Were Dumb Anyway Going to work, seeing the doctor, playing college sports and drinking on the street: How the world will be different after COVID-19.
08.26.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL 8: Risk & Disaster Inside one insurance policy is a world of incentives and bad behaviors. Take the final exam and get your diploma here.
08.22.2020 Crisis At The Post Office Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is facing intense political scrutiny and some very old problems in his new job at the U.S. Postal Service.
08.19.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL 7: Advertising & Race A Black ad executive figures out how to reach diverse audiences.
08.14.2020 Big Rigged Trucking companies have been underpaying workers for years. And now they've found a way to get them to buy the trucks too.

Older episodes

01.27.2021 The World's Biggest Battery (Classic) California has a ton of solar power. But as soon as night falls, it's gone. Today on the show: how to bottle the sun
01.23.2021 How Desi Invented Television The television was invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927. TV was invented by Desi Arnaz in 1951.
01.20.2021 Modern Monetary Theory (Classic) We rethink everything we know about government spending, taxes, and the nature of money.
01.16.2021 The Great Gatsby All of it. Read by the staff of Planet Money.
01.14.2021 Nervous TikTok The U.S. was going to ban TikTok... and then it didn't. We break down the beef with TikTok, and see what life would have been like without it. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.11.2021 Planet Monet (Classic) Investors are pouring money into art, but a lot of it is disappearing into storage. We find out why. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.08.2021 The Bees Go To California (Classic) Almonds taste great. And the logistics behind pollinating almond trees are un-bee-lievable. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
01.07.2021 Chaos At The Capitol With an insurrection at the Capitol, we interrupt Planet Money and turn the feed over to tonight's episode of the NPR Politics podcast. \| Subscribe to Planet Money's weekly newsletter here.
01.01.2021 Bitcoin Losers (Classic) The Bitcoin market is still crazy, but a lot of people can't even find their Bitcoins. We go looking for lost billions. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.30.2020 The Rest Of The Story, 2020 We check in on The Fed, a vaccine scientist, and the mixed martial arts. Oh, and a bunch of escheaters. So long, 2020! \| Support our show here.
12.25.2020 How To Stop An Asteroid (UPDATE) Some smart people say we should be doing more to protect the Earth from asteroids. The technical issues are relatively easy. The economics? Much harder.
12.24.2020 Fork The Government A global pandemic might not be the best time to try something new with technology. But Taiwan decided to do it anyway. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.19.2020 The Mixtape Drama Mixtapes were the heart of hip-hop culture in the 90s. Until an arrest in 2007 brought it all down. \| Today's episode is from our friends at Louder Than a Riot.
12.17.2020 The Case Against Facebook The government just filed one of the largest antitrust cases in history against Facebook. Why now? And what will it mean? \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.11.2020 We Buy A Lot Of Christmas Trees Nick and Robert head to the world's largest Christmas tree auction with $1,000 and a truck. And get schooled in the tree market. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.10.2020 The Stolen Company (Classic) When an American company named ABRO learns their goods are being counterfeited in China, they start their own trade war. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.05.2020 How The Rat Blew Up Unions have been putting giant inflatable rats in front of businesses for years. Now businesses are trying to deflate them, in court. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
12.03.2020 Before The Shot In The Arm Inventing a vaccine for COVID-19 was hard, but getting billions of doses to billions of people is going to be even harder. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.27.2020 Hot Dog Hail Mary (Classic) The Falcons are trying something radical: Making their food cheaper. It could break stadium economics.
11.25.2020 Swamp Gravy (UPDATE) Colquitt, Georgia, was struggling. And then musical theater came along. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.21.2020 All Your Genes Are Belong To Us Who owns your genes, anyway? For a while, Big Biotech patented 20% of the human genome. Then a lawyer took them to the Supreme Court. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.18.2020 Trade Show (UPDATE) It's been a rough four years for free trade. Today on the show, we present 244 years of trade in 22 minutes. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.13.2020 Biden Time Four things Joe Biden can do as president — even if the Democrats don't control Congress. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.11.2020 Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (Classic) One of the few things a new president has a lot of control over is tariff policies. But it wasn't always that way. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.06.2020 Hacking The Perfect Auction A Nobel-Prize winner spent years designing an auction to sell off the airwaves, which are owned by the public. But Wall Street found a tiny flaw. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
11.04.2020 What's Next for the Economy? A research group at Harvard came up with a faster way to check the economy's pulse. It may change how we fight recessions. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.30.2020 What Economy Are You Voting For? Two candidates. Two very different ways of thinking about the economy. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.28.2020 Who Gets To Vote In Florida? Angel Sanchez was 17 and in prison when he learned felons couldn't vote in Florida. When he got out, he tried to change that. It was working – until money got involved.\| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.23.2020 Frame Canada For years, Wendell Potter ran a campaign to terrify Americans... about health care in Canada. Now he explains how he did it, and why. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.22.2020 Hey Google, Are You Too Big? The government just filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. In this episode, we talk about why, and why it matters. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.16.2020 Opening Schools And Other Hard Decisions Emily Oster wanted to understand the risks of opening schools. So she started a massive data collection campaign. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.14.2020 Caste Arrives In Silicon Valley For some Indian employees of big U.S. tech companies, caste discrimination is real. To combat it, first people have to talk about it. That's hard. \| Today's episode is from our friends at Rough Translation.
10.09.2020 Political Ad Nauseam It's presidential election season, and that means it's political ad season. But who do ads target, anyway? \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.07.2020 Rethinking Black Wealth Homes in Black neighborhoods are valued lower than homes in white neighborhoods. Why? This episode, Dr. Andre Perry flips the narrative of the racial wealth gap. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.02.2020 Call Center Call Out We visit life on the other side of your customer service call and get a glimpse into the troubling future of work in America. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
10.01.2020 Trump's Tiny Taxes A totally refreshing 20 minutes or so of infotainment related to Trump, taxes and toy wooden arrows. \| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
09.25.2020 Sell Me Your Climate Bombs There's this greenhouse gas out there that's thousands of times more dangerous than carbon dioxide, lurking in garages and sheds all over the country.
09.23.2020 REDMAP (Update) The result of national elections is shaped in a big and underappreciated way by very local elections. This is the story of the man who shaped many, many local elections to tip the national scales. \| Subscribe to our weekly ...
09.18.2020 Apple v Everybody When Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney sued Apple over its App Store, it started a war about antitrust and the internet.
09.16.2020 After The Plague The Black Death was one of the worst catastrophes to ever hit humanity. But it also helped redistribute wealth and make daily life better for a lot of medieval Europeans.
09.11.2020 Waste Land For 30 years, oil companies convinced the public that all their plastic trash could be, and would be, recycled, when they knew it wasn't true.
09.09.2020 We Buy A Junk Bond Team Indicator buys Cardiff a surprise present. A terrible, extremely risky, but wildly interesting investment. Then it gets interesting. The company that issued the junk bond declared bankruptcy. But that wasn't the end of the story. \| Subscribe to our ...
09.05.2020 The Murderer, The Boy King, And The Invention Of Modern Finance John Law killed a man in a duel, brought the first paper money to France, and became one of the richest people in the world. Then it all collapsed.
09.02.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL: Graduation! Summer School graduates take the stage to show us how we can all see our everyday world through the beautiful lens of economics. \| Take the final exam and get your diploma here.
09.01.2020 Your Brain On Retail Trading Stock-picking retail traders have been jumping into the market this year. They may not understand the risks.
08.28.2020 The Old Rules Were Dumb Anyway Going to work, seeing the doctor, playing college sports and drinking on the street: How the world will be different after COVID-19.
08.26.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL 8: Risk & Disaster Inside one insurance policy is a world of incentives and bad behaviors. Take the final exam and get your diploma here.
08.22.2020 Crisis At The Post Office Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is facing intense political scrutiny and some very old problems in his new job at the U.S. Postal Service.
08.19.2020 SUMMER SCHOOL 7: Advertising & Race A Black ad executive figures out how to reach diverse audiences.
08.14.2020 Big Rigged Trucking companies have been underpaying workers for years. And now they've found a way to get them to buy the trucks too.

Planet Money

What's Planet Money about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Planet Money episodes:

The World's Biggest Battery (Classic)

How Desi Invented Television

Modern Monetary Theory (Classic)

The Great Gatsby

Nervous TikTok

Planet Monet (Classic)

The Bees Go To California (Classic)

Chaos At The Capitol

Bitcoin Losers (Classic)

The Rest Of The Story, 2020

How To Stop An Asteroid (UPDATE)

Fork The Government

The Mixtape Drama

The Case Against Facebook

We Buy A Lot Of Christmas Trees

The Stolen Company (Classic)

How The Rat Blew Up

Before The Shot In The Arm

Hot Dog Hail Mary (Classic)

Swamp Gravy (UPDATE)

All Your Genes Are Belong To Us

Trade Show (UPDATE)

Biden Time

Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (Classic)

Hacking The Perfect Auction

What's Next for the Economy?

What Economy Are You Voting For?

Who Gets To Vote In Florida?

Frame Canada

Hey Google, Are You Too Big?

Opening Schools And Other Hard Decisions

Caste Arrives In Silicon Valley

Political Ad Nauseam

Rethinking Black Wealth

Call Center Call Out

Trump's Tiny Taxes

Sell Me Your Climate Bombs

REDMAP (Update)

Apple v Everybody

After The Plague

Waste Land

We Buy A Junk Bond

The Murderer, The Boy King, And The Invention Of Modern Finance

SUMMER SCHOOL: Graduation!

Your Brain On Retail Trading

The Old Rules Were Dumb Anyway

SUMMER SCHOOL 8: Risk & Disaster

Crisis At The Post Office

SUMMER SCHOOL 7: Advertising & Race

Big Rigged

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