money

On today's episode, we ride through the streets of San Francisco with a long-time junkman, Jon Rolston. Jon has spent the last two decades clearing out houses a…

We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the sch…

For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise…

Most economic textbooks will tell you that there can be real dangers in running up a big national debt. A major concern is how the debt you add now could slow d…

We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space company and wa…

When the vape brand Juul first hit the market back in 2015, e-cigarettes were in a kind of regulatory limbo. At the time, the rules that governed tobacco cigare…

(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2019 .) In 1794, George Washington decided to raise money for the federal government by taxing the rich. He d…

We wade into the heated debate over immigrants' impact on the labor market. When the number of workers in a city increases, does that take away jobs from the pe…

Planet Money Summer School is back for eight weeks. Join as we travel back in time to find the origins of our economic way of life. Today we ask surprisingly ha…

Who has the power? Workers or bosses? It changes through the ages, though it's usually the bosses. Today, we look at two key moments when the power of labor shi…