Ever since free trade opened up between the US and Mexico in the 1990s, trillions of dollars of goods have been going back and forth between the two countries, from cars to strawberries to MRI machines to underwear. But one major exception has been fresh American potatoes. Today on the show, we tell the trade saga of the American potato. For more than 25 years, there was a place that American potatoes could not go to freely. A place that the entire American potato industry was desperate to acces...
Jan 03, 2025•28 min
If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn't think AI is quite there... yet. In this interview, Greg Rosalsky talks with Luis about AI and how it's reshaping translation jobs and the language learning industry. We also ask him about headlines earlier this year suggesting Duolingo laid off some of its workers and replaced them with AI. This is one of Greg's Behind The Newsletter conversations whe...
Dec 30, 2024•17 min
After the gift exchange comes another great holiday tradition: returns season. Once again, we are joining the fun in our own Planet Money way. We are returning to stories from years past to see what's changed since we last reported them. It's an episode we call The Rest of the Story. We have updates on zombie mortgages, student loan forgiveness, Argentina's economy under its self-described anarcho-capitalist president, and the best place in the world to give birth to twins. Plus, a return to... ...
Dec 27, 2024•28 min
This year, there was some economic good news to go around. Inflation generally ticked down. Unemployment more or less held around 4-percent. Heck, the Fed even cut interest rates three times. But for a lot of people, the overall economic vibes were more important. And the vibes... were still off. We might have achieved the soft landing the Fed was hoping for, but we saw some wackiness in the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies. Meanwhile, Bitcoin went to the moon. We have covered...
Dec 25, 2024•22 min
Our planet is in serious trouble. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction, and the biggest cause is companies destroying their habitats to farm food, mine minerals, and otherwise get the raw materials to turn into the products we all consume. So, when Mauricio Serna was in college, he realized his family's plot of land in Colombia, called El Globo , presented a unique opportunity. Sure, it had historically been a cattle ranch. But if he could get the money to tu...
Dec 20, 2024•33 min
Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. So in the 1980s, when computers and deep statistical analysis entered the markets, it also entered the sportsbooks and changed the world of sports gambling in ways we see every day now. On today's episode, we have a story from Michael Lewis' new season of his podcast Against The Rules . We hear from a bookie who was able to beat t...
Dec 18, 2024•30 min
Why do some nations fail and others succeed? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how economists think about global inequality. Their work centered on a powerful — and almost radically obvious — idea: that the economic fate of nations is determined by how societies organize themselves. In other words, the economists shined a spotlight on the power of institutions, the systems, rules, and structures that shape society. We spoke with two...
Dec 14, 2024•28 min
The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them? Today on the show, we tell the nearly 100-year-old story of Smoot and Hawley, that explains why Congress decided to delegate tariff power to the executive branch in the first place. It's a story that weaves in wool, humble buckwheat, tiny little goldfish, and even Ferris Bueller... Anyone? Anyone? It's also what set the stage for the Trump tariffs. President-elect Donald Tru...
Dec 11, 2024•27 min
Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local office in South Lafourche partnered with the federal government's Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive ring of earthen mounds – also known as levees – to keep the floodwaters at bay. But after Hurricane Katrina called into question the integrity of those levees, Windell decided to take a gamble that put him at odds with his partners in the Army C...
Dec 06, 2024•31 min
As people learn more about Donald Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, one story comes up over and over: a legendary trade that he played a small part in while he worked at George Soros' hedge fund in the 1990s. In 1992, Soros' fund set its sights on the British pound, betting that some time in the fall of that year, the pound would plummet in value. Opposing them in this trade was the Bank of England, which was determined to keep its currency stable. The financial battle that fol...
Dec 04, 2024•31 min
The dreaded data breach notification... It tells you your personal data's been compromised and suggests steps you can take to minimize the potential harm. On today's episode, Kenny Malone pulls out a data breach letter he received and goes over what it recommends with Amanda Aronczyk. Amanda recently did a show about the legal and illegal markets for data and tells us how useful these steps actually are. It's news you can use to protect yourself, whether or not you've been part of a data breach!...
Dec 02, 2024•20 min
You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought it. Because it was comfy. Or blue. Or the right price. But what if the style, the color, the cost, maybe even whether you would like it, were choices made for you years before you even thought about buying that piece of furniture. Today on the show: The city that makes or breaks the furniture world. We travel to High Point, North Carolina and meet the people who make the bets – on whether or not you'll ...
Nov 27, 2024•26 min
A couple years ago, Gina Leto, a real estate developer, bought a property with her business partner. The process went like it usually did: Lots of paperwork; a virtual closing. Pretty cut-and-dry. Gina and her partner started building a house on the property. But $800,000 into the construction process, Gina got a troubling call from her lawyer. There was something wrong. At first, Gina thought the house had burned down. It turned out that the situation was... maybe worse. On today's show: Buying...
Nov 23, 2024•26 min
Mass deportations. What would actually happen—economically—if the President-elect follows through on promises to deport millions of people from America. We don't have to guess. Today we have two stories from Planet Money's daily podcast, The Indicator. First, the story from another time the US cracked down on immigration with the expressed intent of helping the economy. We look at how that worked out. And then we distill 20 years of research on immigrants and economic growth. What does immigrati...
Nov 20, 2024•16 min
Every ten years, a group of German farmers gather in the communal farm fields of the Osing for the Osingverlosung , a ritual dating back centuries. Osing refers to the area. And verlosung means "lottery," as in a land lottery. All of the land in this communal land is randomly reassigned to farmers who commit to farming it for the next decade. Hundreds of years ago, a community in Germany came up with their own, unique solution for how to best allocate scarce resources. For this community, the lo...
Nov 15, 2024•29 min
This is the story behind one of the most valuable — and perhaps, most improbable — technologies humanity has ever created. It's a breakthrough called extreme ultraviolet lithography, and it's how the most advanced microchips in the world are made. The kind of chips powering the latest AI models. The kind of chips that the U.S. is desperately trying to keep out of the hands of China. For years, few thought this technology was even possible. It still sounds like science fiction: A laser strong eno...
Nov 13, 2024•27 min
On the day after the election, Wall Street responded in a dramatic way. Some stocks went way up, others went way down. By reading those signals — by breaking down what people were buying and what they were selling — you can learn a lot about where the economy might be headed. Or at least, where people are willing to bet the economy is headed. On today's show, we decode what Wall Street thinks about the next Trump presidency — what it means for different parts of the economy, and what it means fo...
Nov 09, 2024•27 min
Back in the 90s, the federal government ran a bold experiment, giving people vouchers to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. They wanted to test if housing policy could be hope – whether an address change alone could improve jobs, earnings and education. The answer to that seems obvious. But it did not at all turn out as they expected. Years later, when new researchers went back to the data on this experiment, they stumbled on something big. Something that is changing h...
Nov 06, 2024•24 min
Ray and Becky Queen live in rural Oklahoma with their kids (and chickens). The Queens were able to buy that home with a VA loan because of Ray's service in the Army. During COVID, the Queens – like millions of other Americans – needed help from emergency forbearance. They were told they could pause home payments for up to a year and then pick up again making affordable mortgage payments with no problems. That's what happened for most American homeowners who took forbearance. But not for tens of ...
Nov 01, 2024•37 min
If you... exist in the world, it's likely that you have gotten a letter or email at some point informing you that your data was stolen. This happened recently to potentially hundreds of millions of people in a hack that targeted companies like Ticketmaster, AT&T, Advance Auto Parts and others that use the data cloud company Snowflake. On today's show, we try to figure out where that stolen data ended up, how worried we should be about it, and what we're supposed to do when bad actors take our pe...
Oct 31, 2024•29 min
There's something strange going on in hospitals. Cheap, common drugs that nurses use every day seem to be constantly hit by shortages. These are often generic drugs that don't seem super complicated to make, things like dextrose and saline (aka sugar water and salt water). So what's going on? The answer, as with anything in healthcare, is complicated. On today's show: why hospitals keep running out of generic drugs. The story behind these shortages tells us a lot about how these drugs are made, ...
Oct 25, 2024•26 min
On today's show, we have two stories from The Indicator , Planet Money 's daily podcast. They just launched Love Week, a weeklong series exploring the business and economic side of romance. First, hosts Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma fire up the gas logs and pour a mug of cocoa to discuss the made-for-TV rom-com machine, and how television executives learned to mass produce seasonal romance. Then, Wailin and host Darian Woods discuss another romance medium: the romance novel. Once relegated to superm...
Oct 23, 2024•17 min
Over the past two decades, there's been a sort of tectonic economic shift happening under our feet. More and more companies have switched from selling goods one by one to selling services, available as a subscription. These days everything from razor blades to meal kits to car washes have become subscriptions. But all that convenience has also come with a dark side – some companies have designed their offerings to be as easy as possible to sign up for and also as difficult as possible to cancel....
Oct 18, 2024•31 min
(For our story on this year's Nobel in Economics, check out our daily show, The Indicator !) Let's face it. Economics is filled with terms that don't always make sense to the average person. Terms that sometimes mean what you think they mean, but sometimes not at all. Not even close. We surveyed 188 economists. And we asked them: What are the most misunderstood terms in the field of economics? On today's show, their answers! Hear stories about near recessions, a problem with insurance, econ at y...
Oct 16, 2024•21 min
Even in our modern world with planes and jets and drones, the vast majority of goods are moved around the planet in cargo ships. Which means our ports are the backbone of our global economy. The longshoremans' strike closed the eastern ports for only three days, but those three days raised a lot of questions. Like - why is a discount furniture store the fourth largest importer on the East Coast? How come so many bananas come through Wilmington, Delaware? Why do we need live frogs delivered into ...
Oct 11, 2024•26 min
Recently, the state of Washington embarked on an ambitious new plan to combat climate change. Taking a page from economics textbooks, the state instituted a statewide "cap and trade" system for carbon emissions. The state establishes a cap on the total amount of carbon pollution it is willing to allow each year, and then gives away or auctions off carbon emission permits that add up to that total. Companies can then trade those permits on the open market. Economists love cap and trade plans beca...
Oct 09, 2024•24 min
The lawyer commercial is almost an art form unto itself. Learned practitioners of the law doing whatever it takes to get your attention, from impressive dirt bike stunts to running around half naked . All so when you land in trouble, you don't have to think hard to remember their name. Odds are you can name one or two right now. This world of law ads did not exist fifty years ago. Then, lawyers were not allowed to advertise. Not by law, by the exclusive organization that decides who gets to be a...
Oct 04, 2024•19 min
(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016 .) Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn't have enough food. Hospitals didn't have basic supplies, like gauze. Child mortality was spiking. Businesses were shuttering. It's one of the epic economic collapses of our time. And it was totally avoidable. Venezuela used to be a relatively rich country. It has just about all the economic advantages a country could ask for: Beautiful beaches and mountains ready for...
Oct 02, 2024•23 min
"Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy." That is the bold promise in Planet Money 's tagline. And we believe the show does live up to it. Over the last year, we've told stories about breakdancing , rum , pagers , buffets , colors , and heartbreak . But then one host wondered: what if we really held ourselves to that promise? What if we challenged ourselves to find economic meaning in the most esoteric and far-flung topics imaginable? That's when we turned to ...
Sep 27, 2024•26 min
Next week, JD Vance and Tim Walz will face off in the only confirmed vice presidential debate ahead of the election. As voters look ahead to what their economic policies might be, we look back to see what they have said and done, and how it turned out. Planet Money's newsletter author Greg Rosalsky has spent some time combing through the economic records of Vance and Walz , and has some knowledge to share. Why does Walz support universal free school lunches, and why do some criticize him for it?...
Sep 25, 2024•25 min
