Planet Money - SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Index Funds & The Bet

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

In 2006, Warren Buffett bet a million dollars that the most brainless, boring investment around would do better than the researched, handpicked investments of some of the smartest hedge fund managers in the world. The second class of Summer School looks at how that bet played out, the origins of the index fund, and why it's so hard to beat the market. Returning to the underlying theme of risk and reward, we also discuss how diversification reduces risk. | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Hey everyone, welcome back to Season 2 of Planet Money Summer School. The finance education that tries to quickly show you how to make lots of money slowly. Today's episode, index funds and a billionaire's big bet. My name is Cardiff Garcia, and every Wednesday until Labor Day, we are presenting you with a new lesson about the principles of investing, featuring some of our favorite episodes from the Planet Money archives, and a lot of new stuff too. Last week in class one, we asked the question, where do stock prices come from?

And we learned two theories with competing answers. In this week's class, we're asking a new question. Which stocks should I buy? Remember, investing is about the trade-off between risk and reward. You can't make money without exposing yourself to the possibility of losing money. And today, we are going to learn about a strategy for picking stocks that is stunningly simple, but also kind of like a magic trick when it comes to giving you more reward for the risk that you take. And we'll hear from the inventor of this strategy and about all the doubters who

fought back against his big idea. This dramatic turning point in financial history is explained in a classic Planet Money episode that first aired in 2016, hosted by David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. And stick around after the episode, because we are going to then discuss the deeper investment lessons from the episode with our Planet Money summer school professors. Here it is. Carol Loomis has known Warren Buffett for a long time. We've been friends for how many years? 33, 16, 49, 50 years.

You know, we've been friends for 50 years. Loomis is a reporter. She worked for decades at Fortune magazine. Warren Buffett, of course, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, legendary investor, also third richest man on the planet. What kind of stuff do you do together? Well, we play bridge. He's an avid online bridge player. And when the computer breaks down, it drives him crazy.

Warren Buffett, just like your grandpa, only richer. Much, much richer. We called Carol Loomis because of the story she has been deeply involved in for a number of years now. It's a story about a bet. She says the story of the bet starts back in 2006. It's at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, which is this big thing every year. It's like this capitalist Woodstock. Is that what it's actually called? I mean, that's like the unofficial joke name of it. Thousands of people fly in.

Buffett is up on this stage talking. And the subject of hedge funds comes up. You know, hedge funds, like investment firms for rich people with these brilliant PhDs working crazy long hours. And Buffett says those guys, they are not worth the fees they are charging investors. So he says, I'm willing to make a bet. I can pick an investment that will beat the hedge funds. I don't know that he ever realized that anyone would pick him up on this bet. He certainly wasn't going to do it for a small amount of money.

And you want to make a declaration by the size of the bet. This is a serious matter. A few guys from the hedge fund world hear about this challenge and they say, sure, we'll take you up on it. On January 1st, 2008, they make a 10-year bet. So how big is the bet? One million dollars. Ooh.

It sounds like a lot of money. It is. The hedge fund guys bet on hedge funds, these groups of super smart elite investing wizards. Buffett, for his side of the bet, he does not pick a few stocks. He doesn't even pick his own company. He picks one of the most brainless, boring investments there is. After a quick break, we find out just what investment Warren Buffett chose for this million-dollar wager. We return now to the story from Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum of Planet Money about Warren Buffett's bet against a group of hedge funds. If you have any money invested in the stock market, if you have something socked away for your retirement or for your kid's college fund or whatever, you have taken a side in this bet whether you know it or not. We wanted to understand both sides. So let's do the Warren Buffett side first. understand both sides. So let's do the Warren Buffett side first. The weapon he chose in his battle against the hedge funds, the simple, brainless investment he picked, it was created

far from Wall Street in Malvern, Pennsylvania. It was created by this man. I'm probably the cheapest guy you will ever meet in your life. John C. Bogle. I don't buy anything. How old are these pants you wear? Yeah, I'd say 15. 15 years. The sweater? Well, it's out of L.L. Bean. That's probably only about eight. Bogle, as you may know, founded a company called Vanguard, named, by the way, after a ship in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yeah, you walk around the offices out there in Malvern, and you feel like they have bought every single oil painting of every old naval battle in history.

There is barely a picture that does not have a ship in it. That's the way it is. We like ships. I saw this one painting that was just of an ocean. I was like, oh, there's one. It's just an ocean. And you're like, no, that is the view from the ship. That simple brainless investment that Warren Buffett picked in the bed is called an index fund. John Bogle created the first index fund back in 1976. He had just read this article by a famous economist named Paul Samuelson. And what Samuelson wrote in this article was he could not find any good evidence that professional investors, that people whose job is to pick stocks, he couldn't find any

evidence that they were any good. If you took a bunch of professional investors and looked at how they did over a long time, and you took the average. They did not beat the market. Like when you hear on the news the stock market closed up 1% today, you'd be better off investing in that stupid measure of the stock market than paying someone to try to beat it. Samuelson wrote that maybe, quote, most portfolio decision makers should go out of business, take up plumbing, teach Greek. At this point, John Bogle has been in the business for 20 years, since he graduated from college. He has basically been one of those people who Samuelson says should go out of business. But he takes Samuelson's argument seriously.

In fact, he decides to check the numbers himself. And I do the math. I go to these old books of investment company performance, and I added up each column, got an average for 35 years. And he found that Samuelson was right. In fact, for the investment funds he looked at, when you added in the fees they charged, they did worse on average than the stock market. And you could say, well, I just won't pick a bad investment fund. I'll pick a good one that can really pick the right stocks.

That turns out to be very hard to do. Stock pickers who do well one year, they don't always do well the next. And there are, of course, some who do well for a few years in a row. But, you know, you would expect that if everybody was just randomly guessing. You know, if you had a thousand people flipping coins, a few of them are going to flip heads 10 times in a row. Bogle saw all of this and thought, so what do we do? And at the end of that article that he had read by the famous economist, there was this suggestion. And he basically said to cut through his more elegant words,

would somebody somewhere please start an index fund? And I thought, why not me? Start an index fund. Bogle figured he would just create this super simple index fund that people could invest in. He wouldn't pick stocks. He wouldn't say, I think this company is great. I'm going to buy their stock and I'm going to avoid that other company because I don't like them. He was just going to make a fund that was a collection of every stock in the stock market. I mean, not every single stock, but the biggest 500 companies on the U.S. stock market.

So if you're doing this today, Apple is the biggest company. You'd buy some of that. Yeah. And then, you know, whatever. GE, also a big company. You buy that too, but a little less in proportion to its size and on down 500 companies. It's called an index fund because it is just mindlessly tracking a stock index. Actually, the index that you hear on the news all the time, the S&P 500, as in the S&P 500 closed up a quarter of a percent today. So if the stock market, if the S&P 500 has a good day, your index fund is going to have a good day. Has a bad day, the index fund is going to have a bad day. It is not trying to do anything tricky.

Bogle creates this in 1976, and he's ready to open it up to the world. The first index fund ever. This is a fund for everybody. You can put in a small amount of money or a lot. Bogle gets a bunch of big investment firms to go out to their clients and say, here's this great new thing. You want in? How much money were they hoping to get? $150 million. How much did you get? $11 million. It was a flop. The investment firms go back to Bogle and they say, nobody wants this thing. Let's just kill it. And I said, wait a

minute. We have the world's first index fund. We're going to keep the 11 million and we'll do our best. Investors don't really like this idea. Also, the investment industry does not like this idea because it's an insult to everything they stand for and they're trying to do. At this point in the interview, at this moment in the story, Bogle points to the wall, points to something hanging on the wall right by where we're sitting. Look over there. What's going on?

That's the first reception from Wall Street. Wait, that's an actual poster you're pointing at. Yes. Came out in 1976. He's pointing at a poster that he says a brokerage firm printed up back in the 70s. Has this big picture of Uncle Sam, and it says, help stamp out index funds. Index funds are un-American. Un-American. I get it, right? I mean, one of the things that makes America great is that

people work really hard to do better than average. Yeah. And if you buy an index fund, you are buying something that is designed to be average, that is guaranteed never to be better than average. And nowhere else in your life and no other important thing would you go for average. You know, if you're going to have surgery, would you be like, okay, I just want to make sure I have an average doctor? No, no, right? You would call every person you know, you would do all the research you could to find a surgeon who is better than average. And it just makes so much sense that if you're picking a stock, there's got to be somebody out there who knows something, who can say this is a better company to invest in than that one.

Somebody called the index fund the, quote, pursuit of mediocrity. Somebody else called it a formula for a solid, consistent, long-term loser. Bogle keeps the index fund open, and he waits for the world to just come around to his way of seeing things. A year goes by, and then another. A decade passes. So you've been out there for 10 years with the greatest idea of your life. Right. And where are you? Zero percent.

He's rounding down there. Yeah, he's rounding down there. It's a small part of the world. If you take, like, all of the funds out there, index funds are like 0.4% a decade in. The idea of the index fund did finally start to catch on in the 1990s. One of the reasons, index funds had very low fees. Yeah, and think about it this way. If you're running a traditional fund, you have to pay people to pick stocks, pay them to read reports and crunch numbers and fly out to meet

with the CEO and visit the factory. If you're running an index fund, you don't have to pay people to do any of those things. So you can charge investors lower fees. If you take a typical stock fund today and you invest, say, $10,000, they're going to charge you a fee of $100 every year. The Vanguard Index Fund, they're going to charge you $5. a fee of $100 every year. The Vanguard index fund, they're going to charge you $5. In recent years, a lot of people have said, OK, I give up. A bunch of money has flowed into index funds.

We wanted to see what giving up looks like. So we went to the room where they run their index funds. And I mean, it wasn't much, you know, like it was quiet. There were a few computers, could have been like any office. There's a handful of people in there, and they're very intentionally not picking stocks. It does seem boring. It does feel like giving up. It is the essence of boredom. I'll concede it. If you're in investing for excitement, you are a damn fool. You're watching the market every day, up and down, 100 point, 200, 300, 400 point swings day after day.

It's exciting, but it's meaningless. So that is the story of the boring, super simple investment that Warren Buffett picked for his side of the bet. And to be clear, he actually picked that very fund, the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund. Now for someone from the other side of the bet, the humans can win, we can do better side of the bet. His name is Ted Seides. He's worked for years in the hedge fund world. He heard Warren Buffett's challenge and figured, yeah, I know some really smart people who can do better than average. I thought I had a rare chance to catch somebody like Warren potentially being the patsy at the poker table. I'm sorry, you said to catch him being what?

The patsy at the poker table. This is the summer of 2007, and Seides sends Buffett a letter, like an actual letter in an envelope with a stamp, old school. He says he's interested in taking the other side of the bet. And so let's talk about what stakes you propose. And my typical stakes might be over dinner. Yours might be a little higher than mine, but let's see what happens. A little while after that, Seides gets this email and there's a PDF attached.

He opens up the PDF and what's happened is Buffett has taken that letter and just scrawled some notes on it. Then somebody scans it in and sends it back to him. So they go back and forth for a while now. They start negotiating the bet. Safe to say he was comfortable with higher stakes than I was.

You're making a bet with one of the two or three richest men in the bet. Safe to say he was comfortable with higher stakes than I was. You're making a bet with one of the two or three richest men in the world. Correct. They settled on that million-dollar bet. Buffett picked the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund. Seides and his partners picked a collection of hedge funds. Seides knows all that data that John Bogle mentioned about how stock pickers can't beat the market. But these hedge funds, they do more than stock picking. Yeah, I mean, they're incredibly elite, incredibly smart people. And, you know, they can sell shares short. They can bet against companies. They can get in and out of the market.

They can invest in derivatives. Some hedge funds are filled with quants, mathematicians, former physics types. They are not naive about what they are doing. And Saidis has spent his career working inside this world, this world of people who believe they really can beat the market. He started out at Yale helping manage the school's endowment. And that particular endowment, the Yale endowment, is run by this guy who has been beating the market for decades.

Seides says when you go to work with that guy every day, you realize he is not lucky. He is really, really good. You know who else is really good, he says? The person on the other side of the bed, Warren Buffett. Another way of framing that question is, do you believe that Warren Buffett has skill? Or is he just anomalous because there are so many people who are picking stocks, he just happens to be the guy who's outperformed?

because there are so many people who are picking stocks, he just happens to be the guy who's outperformed. And what I would tell you is that when you spend time with Warren, and you spend time with many, many, many other money managers, you can come away with a very high degree of confidence that if Warren started investing for the first time today, he would outperform in the future. So you're sure you're not tricking yourself there? In what way? He's a charismatic guy. You meet him, you think this guy's great. It's not the charisma piece.

It's temperament, discipline, insight. I know, that all sounds like very vague management stuff. The question is, I keep wanting to go back to the numbers. Because you meet people, and they've done well the last X years, or maybe the one person has done well their whole life. And so you tend to think that person has something, but maybe not. Maybe they're just lucky. Well, I think that's the eternal question in investing. The eternal question in investing. After a quick break, part two, how the bet played out.

We return to our classic Planet Money episode, hosted by Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum, about the million-dollar bet between Warren Buffett and Ted Saidis. The first year, 2008, was a terrible year for Warren Buffett, a terrible year for the index fund. As you probably remember, that was the year of the financial crisis. The stock market, the index fund, got hammered. Yeah, Buffett had terrible timing, right? Worst time to start this bet.

By early 2009, things were looking really good for the hedge fund side, for Ted Seides. We were way ahead. Like what to what? The market would have been down about 45%. And the hedge funds were probably down about 25%. So if I'm imagining two runners on the track, like your runner is really kind of pulling ahead at this point. It's safe to say our runner hadn't moved much, and the market runner had gone backwards a few miles. The next year, that was a good year for Buffett. Also the year after that. Also the year after that. The index fund kept beating the hedge funds.

That stupid, simple investment was better than roomfuls of really smart people. Where we stand now, as of the end of 2015, the index fund is up 66%. The hedge fund's up only 22%. It's a huge gap. Like you're not even close. No. No, that's right. There is not much time left.

The bet ends soon, December 31st, 2017. Saidi says the only way the hedge funds could win at this point is if there's like another huge stock market crash. And he says he doesn't want to see that happen, obviously. Are you bummed about probably having lost this bet? A little bit, sure. Yeah, you had a chance to beat Warren Buffett. Yeah, with the odds in my favor and didn't play out the way I thought it would. You thought the odds were in your favor. I still think the odds were in my favor. He actually says he would take the bet again if he could, if he could go back to 2008.

He says it's essentially a fluke that the stock market has done as well as it has over the past eight years. So you're saying you made the right bet, you just got unlucky. Yeah, that is how I feel about it. And Buffett's only going to win because he got lucky. I think he did end up on the lucky side of the distribution. Isn't it also possible that it

is just very, very hard to beat the market? Oh, it's not possible. That's a truth. What's your advice to ordinary people who do not have a lot of money but want to put some of the money in the stock market? I think they should index. From the hedge fund side of the bet.

You know, like I actually think his whole position, frankly, makes some sense. Like I do think there are some people out there who really can beat the market, who are not just getting lucky. Somebody's got to be first. But, you know, for me, when I'm deciding what am I going to do with my money, I don't think I can figure out who that person is. I don't think I can pick the next Warren Buffett. So full disclosure here, getting near the end of the show, I put my money in index funds. Me too. With the exception of the dollars in my wallet, basically everything is in an index fund. You want to do your rant here? Yeah.

I mean, you do it all the time in real life. Yeah, it drives me crazy when I'm talking to a friend or someone at a party and they're like, you know, my mom knows how to pick stocks. She knew IBM was going to do great. It just drives me bananas. Because, like, they were just lucky. That doesn't prove anything. That's one of your charming cocktail party conversational techniques.

I'm really fun. Please invite me. So, all right. You don't think you can pick the next Warren Buffett. I don't think I can pick the next Warren Buffett. Also, one other person who doesn't think he can pick the next Warren Buffett? Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett, yes. In a public letter last year, Buffett described the instructions for the money he's leaving to his wife and his will. And he said to invest almost all of it in, quote, ready? A very low cost S&P 500 index fund. Lots of people are taking Warren Buffett's advice. There are now trillions of dollars in index funds. But there are many trillions more in funds where people are being paid to pick stocks.

In other words, most people are still hoping they can be better than average. As expected, Warren Buffett won the bet. Ted Seides lost. By the end, the S&P 500 had gained an average of 7.1% per year. The hedge funds made only 2.2% a year after fees. They got just clobbered. Buffett asked that the winnings be donated to a charity called Girls Incorporated of Omaha, and the group used that money to turn an old convent into housing for young women transitioning out of foster care.

After a quick break, what the bet teaches us about investing. Okay, folks, we are back. And I am now joined by our Planet Money professors, Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute and Mihir Desai of Harvard Business School. Welcome. Hello. Thanks for having us. Great to be back.

So Warren Buffett won the bet, and the lesson from that episode seems to just be that it is really, really hard to beat the market by picking individual stocks. Yeah. Absolutely. And in some sense, that's one of the great lessons of finance is about how do you think about investing in one stock versus investing in lots of stocks? And that turns out to be really important. And in short, you can sleep a lot more easily if you do a whole bunch than in one. a term for choosing to spread out your money among a lot of investments. It's called diversification. So let's start there. What are the effects of diversifying your investments? So the problem that diversification is solving is that exposing yourself to any one risk is really a hard way to live because if things go really badly with that particular company, you're going to lose a lot of money. So the beautiful thing in diversification is these risks actually tend to offset each other.

They kind of cancel each other out in a way. So let's think about what might do well when the economy does poorly. Let's say U-Haul, for example. People start to move and they have to kind of rent their own stuff. That might do well when the economy does poorly. So you have a little bit of U-Haul, but then you also have a little bit of Tesla. Well, why would you want that? Well, because when the economy is doing well, people are going to have that kind of income that they're going to be able to afford a Tesla. So that is the sense in which there's this power of diversification. I mean, you can't overstate it because we've been saying all along, no risk, no reward. If you take, if you have a higher return, you're probably taking on more risk. Well, the one

exception to that rule is diversification. So if you, say, bought four stocks, you would have a lower return and higher risk than if you bought 500 stocks. So it's the one, I guess, free lunch we have in finance is that you get a higher return and less risk. Exactly right. I mean, if you go way back, initially, people would invest in just a few companies. What happened in the last 50 years is you could actually have somebody manage your money and buy lots and lots of stocks. That turned out to be a really powerful idea. Lots of people liked it. And then the last stage of it is, I'm not even going to hire anyone to pick the stocks.

Now, we're just going to hire a computer to buy every company in the world. And not only that, it makes it a lot easier to buy stocks. So it really democratized stock ownership where all of us now can buy stocks. As opposed to in the 60s, stock ownership mainly looked like a couple rich people owning a few stocks. It was very risky. You had to really know what you were doing. Now you don't even have to know what you're doing. You can just buy shares in a passive fund and be done. And the odds are it will return money for you over time. Yeah. And to understand why investing in an index is a good risk reward

trade-off, it also helps to understand this other big concept in finance, which is the efficient market hypothesis. What exactly is the efficient market hypothesis and what does it say? Well, roughly, it just says that all the information that's out there is going to already be incorporated in the stock price. And if that's true, then this is why indexing works. You can't beat the market, right? Because if there's something, some insight you had that no one else had, then you could just pick one stock. If you knew in 1995 that Amazon was going to be what it was, then you would just buy Amazon. You wouldn't buy the whole S&P 500 and you would have a lot more money today. And in a way, that's never been more

true than today, which is in the last five years, we've seen a very select number of companies, Facebook and Amazon and Netflix and Google and Apple, as contributing disproportionately to the overall stock market. Now, one reaction to that cardiff is, damn, I should have just put all my money in those five companies. But the more sophisticated answer to that is, well, yeah. Afterwards, it's always easy to say, look at those five companies. They've done amazingly well to that is, well, yeah. Afterwards, it's always easy to say, look at those five companies. They've done amazingly well. Efficient markets doesn't

matter. I should just be buying those five companies. But if you dial back 10 years, you're going to realize that it's not so simple. Foresight is impossible, is the lesson of this episode. Yes. Exactly. And despite the fact that many people will sell you their foresight. Yes. Exactly. And despite the fact that many people will sell you their foresight. Okay. I want to just stop for a second and tease apart this idea because it really does get at why buying an index fund gives you that better trade-off of risk and reward than picking

individual stocks. First, Mihir, as you just said, because it is just impossible to predict the future. Mehir, as you just said, because it is just impossible to predict the future. So it's hard to pick which specific individual stocks are going to be great, not just now, but years from now. Because a company might be the best at what it does at the moment, but the markets can change, the economy can change, and then that same company might fall behind and its stock price will fall with it. This happens all the time. And then second,

because it's a very small number of these high-flying stocks, which are responsible for pulling up the entire stock market. Most individual stocks actually do worse than the overall stock market, which means that if you're actively trying to pick stocks, the odds are stacked against you from the beginning. And so buying all the stocks in an index means that you're guaranteed to buy those few good ones that will take off without even having to guess which they'll be. Does that make sense? I think that makes sense. And that's the beauty of diversification is you don't have to pick which one they're going to be the outperformers. You know, the odds are you're not going to pick them, but you can still benefit from that if you hold enough stocks.

Yeah. And by the way, the challenges of actively picking stocks apply also to people who do it for a living to the professionals. So here's a statistic I want to share with our listeners. If you look at the funds that are run by professional investors who actively try to pick stocks. So these are not index funds. I want to be clear. These are funds where professional investors are actively picking stocks. Well, only one out of five of those funds did better than the stock market over the last decade. Allison, what should we make of that? I'm surprised it's that high. Well, we also know, by the way, from other research that even the few investors that did beat the market in the last 10 years by actively picking stocks are not going to be the same

investors that beat the market in the next 10 years, which means that it's not just hard to actively pick stocks. It's also hard to actively pick active stock pickers. I think that's exactly right with just that tiny caveat, which is that we still need those people out there who are supposed to be doing that hard work of figuring out all that information. Because what you need for these prices to have any meaning is they have to incorporate information in the market. And if everyone's just sort of like, I'm just going to buy everything, you're not getting that information in.

So you do need some people doing that. I love this because it suggests that the rest of us who invest passively are benefiting from a small minority of heavily diluted investors. Well, they're compensated for that, so I wouldn't feel too bad for them. Okay, fair enough. deluded investors. Well, they're compensated for that, so I wouldn't feel too bad for them. Okay, fair enough. Bottom line, though, if you're a regular person and not a well-compensated professional investor, you're getting a better deal buying an index fund, yes? Yes, I'd agree. Buy an index fund. And this is the essence of efficient markets, which is

you really shouldn't be trying with individual stocks to beat the market with the caveat that unless it's driving engagement in personal finance or driving education into new technologies that you're interested in, it really doesn't make sense. If you want to learn about a part of the economy and you want to start to investigate companies, it can be a great way. So if you get super interested in messenger RNA and you want to learn about it. Well, you buy some Moderna stock. You want to learn about carbon capture, and you invest in a carbon capture company. That is a super fun, engaging way to learn about the economy and to do things. Just don't convince yourself that that should be the majority of your portfolio. Take a very small piece of your portfolio, 10 or 20%, enjoy it, learn it, have fun, do

it socially. That can be a good way to live. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, we're all complicated human beings here. We are allowed to have different motivations for investing besides just making more money. We just want everyone to know the risks that they're taking if they invest in the stock market and they are actively trying to pick stocks, right? Everything in moderation. Yes, indeed. And that wraps up

today's class. But before we go, let's recap some vocab words from today. So we learned what an index fund is. That's an investment vehicle that lets people invest in the whole stock market or a huge part of the stock market, as opposed to just investing in a few stocks. And we also learned how doing that helps achieve an important investing principle, which happens to be the second vocab word, diversification. By spreading out your investments, you reduce your risk. That applies to stocks, but also other parts of your life. And then finally, we heard about the efficient market hypothesis. You probably can't beat the market unless you're very, very lucky. And that's it.

That wraps up today's class. This is season two of Planet Money Summer School. If you want to catch up on season one from last year, the easiest way is to just Google Planet Money Summer School. And there you'll be able to find a page with all of last year's episodes on how to think like an economist and even a final exam for when you're done. Planet Money Summer School is produced by Audrey Dilling with help from Alexi Horowitz-Gazi, Darius Rafian and Gilly Moon. It is edited by Alex Goldmark. Special thanks also to Devin

Meller, our project manager, and to Liana Simstrom. You can find us on social media everywhere as at Planet Money, and we do read emails at planetmoneyatnpr.org. Just please put summer school in the subject line. I'm Cardiff Garcia, and I'm also the host of my own upcoming podcast called The New Bazaar. The first episode airs on August 12th. Planet Money is a production of NPR. Thanks for listening.