Planet Money

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 "lotter...

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 ...

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...

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 ho...

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 mi...

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 pe...

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 t...

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, host...

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 a...

(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 tha...