Planet Money
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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Iran, protests, and sanctions
<p >Book tour tickets and details here.<p >The recent protests in Iran are about so many things. Human rights, corruption, freedom. But this time – they are also motivated by economic hardship. Hardship caused, in part, by US sanctions. <p >The US has been sanctioning Iran in one way or another for 47 years. But sanctions, as a tool, only work some of the time, and US sanctions on Iran have not always conformed to what experts consider best practices.<p >On today’s episode: What did US sanctions do to Iran's economy? How did they feed into the latest protests and c...
Riding with the repo man (update)
Planet Money book tour ticket info and dates here. <br/><br/>A record number of Americans with poor or just okay credit are behind on their car payments. And once last year’s numbers are tallied, an estimated 3 million cars will have been repossessed in 2025. That would be on par with how bad it got during the Great Recession. What’s going on? And why now? <br/><br/>Today on the show, we focus on the micro part of the story to answer the macro question. First, we hear a favorite story of ours from 2019. We follow the lifecycle of a deli...
Can Trump make buying a home more affordable?
Book tour dates and ticket info here.<br/><br/>Housing is too expensive. Everyone knows this. Democrats know that talking about it plays well with voters. And now – in a midterm election year – President Donald Trump seems to be focused on it, too. <br/><br/>His administration has recently started talking more about affordability. And they’re taking action with two new initiatives that aim to make buying a house easier. <br/><br/>Today on the show, we’re gonna take a close look at these two moves. And ask: Will they work?<br/><br/>Subscribe to Planet Money+<br/><br/>Listen...
Can transforming neighborhoods help kids escape poverty?
In the 1990s, Congress created HOPE VI, a program that demolished old public housing projects and replaced them with more up-to-date ones. But the program went further than just improving public housing buildings. HOPE VI was designed to transform neighborhoods with concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that attracted people with different incomes. Some people who moved to HOPE VI neighborhoods earned too much to qualify for public housing. And some even paid for market-rate housing. The idea was that this would help create new opportunities for the low-income people who lived there and even lift people out of poverty.<br/><br/>...
A trip to the magic mushroom megachurch
Book tour dates and ticket info here.<br/><br/>Just as every market has its first movers, every religion has its martyrs — the people willing to risk everything for what they believe. Pastor Dave Hodges just might be a little bit of both. He’s the spiritual leader of the Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants, in Oakland, California which places psilocybin mushrooms at the center of their religious practice.<br/><br/>Today on the show, like its 130,000+ members, we’re going to take a trip through the psychedelic mushroom megachurch. We’ll meet one of the lawyers trying to keep psy...
BOARD GAMES 3: What’s in a name?
Planet Money has teamed up with the company Exploding Kittens to make a board game inspired by the legendary economics paper The Market for Lemons. We’ve decided we want a mass-appeal party game that quietly sneaks in the economics, so that we can report from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has entered: the real shelves at real big box retail stores. <br/><br/>We have a great game mechanic and a set of rules. Now all we need is a good name and theme. <br/><br/>Turns out, that is way harder and way higher stak...
Chevron, Venezuela and the Paradox of Plenty
Venezuela and Chevron have perhaps one of the strangest partnerships … ever? Chevron, one of the world’s most famous and profitable oil corporations, has for decades, been plugging away in Venezuela, one of the world’s most famous and infamous socialist countries. <br/><br/>Today on the show, the story of their intertwined histories. Before Saudi Arabia, before Iran… there was Venezuela, the first petrostate. The first country whose entire economy became dependent on oil. With the blessing of oil, an entire economic textbook of complications opened up: from the Dutch Disease, to the resource curse, to mono-economic vulnerability.<br/><br/>And...
How much money President Trump and his family have made
Before President Donald Trump’s first term, he was in a “tight spot” financially, according to New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick. At the start of his second term, David says, Trump was in an “even tighter” spot. But after just six months into his second term, Trump’s financial situation started looking really good.<br/><br/><br>David has done a full accounting for what the family has been up to, and even using conservative estimates, David says Trump and his family have made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in just about a year.<br/><br/><br>Today on the show: we...
So are we in an AI bubble? Here are clues to look for.
Are we in an AI bubble? That’s the $35 trillion dollar question right now as the stock market soars higher and higher. The problem is that bubbles are famously hard to spot. But some economists say they may have found some telltale clues.<br/><br/><br>On our latest: How do economists detect a bubble? And, how much should society be worried about bubbles in the first place? <br/><br/><br>Related shows:<br/><br/><br>- How to make $35 trillion ... disappear<br/><br/>-What is a bubble? (featuring Nobel prize winning economics Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller)<br/><br/>-Wh...
How Black hair care grew Black power
The Afro is one of the most iconic hairstyles of the last century. And one of its main ingredients was a hair product – Afro Sheen. But Afro Sheen did so much more than make Black afros shine. It was the money behind the television show Soul Train, it helped fuel the civil rights movement – all because of an entrepreneur named George Johnson. <br/><br/>For decades, Joan and George Johnson owned and ran Johnson Products Company, a Black hair care company out of Chicago. Their intimate understanding of what Black people wanted and needed – for their hair and for their lives –...
