How the government got hedge funded
Episode Date: October 10, 2025The 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 borrow...
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511 episodes transcribedThe 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 borrow...
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 We...
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...
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 co...
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 fro...
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...
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 al...
(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...
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...
There’s one question we seem to be hearing everywhere: “Is my job safe from AI?” Dozens of you, our listeners, have written to us about this. Saying t...
President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Federal Reserve from a few angles. So we wanted to look at other examples of political pressure on cent...
When we stumbled upon Milk.com, we were mystified. It appears to be someone’s personal website. But memorable domain names can be worth a million doll...
The Federal Reserve has been under intense pressure from President Donald Trump as he pushes for more control over the historically independent agency...
Get your own personalized summer school diploma here. Today on our final episode of Summer School 2025, we will test your knowledge. We will salute th...
In the past couple years, demand has gone wild for drugs like Ozempic – and its cousins, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. For people who had never been...
Tariffs are the favorite tool of our current president, but there are lots of other ways that governments insert themselves into the free exchange of...
For most Americans, we just lived through the highest period of inflation in our lives. And we are reminded of this every time we go grocery shopping....
In economics, a market is a place (even virtual) where buyers and sellers meet to exchange goods or services. Economists love markets. It's like all o...
After President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists and statisticians across the board were horrified. Because the firi...
LIVE SHOW: August 18th in Brooklyn. Tickets here. Traditional economics says the market is guided by the forces of supply and demand. Customers decide...