Planet Money

Last month, during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the United States had offered to functionally loan Argentina $20 billion. Despite th...

(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2022.)Every time you shop online and make it to the checkout screen, you see those colorful pastel buttons at the bottom. Affirm. Klarna. Afterpay. A...

When people in Maine prisons started getting laptops to use in their cells for online classes and homework, it sparked this new idea. Could they have laptops in their cells to work remotely for real o...

People in the U.S. are feeling the financial squeeze, in part because of rising inflation, higher consumer prices and slowing job growth. The Indicator from Planet Money is tackling a special series o...

This week’s SNAP crisis is just a preview. Tucked inside the giant tax-cut and spending bill signed by President Donald Trump this summer are enormous cuts to SNAP: Who qualifies, how much they get, a...

For decades, the U.S. has been the single biggest source of remittances worldwide. A remittance is a transfer of money, typically from an immigrant to their family in their country of origin. But we a...

The U.S. Constitution famously outlaws “cruel and unusual punishments.” But there's another, far more obscure part of the Constitution called the Excessive Fines Clause, which basically says that the ...

When TikTok videos started to go viral on Instagram and Reddit, TikTok turned to professional sound designers to protect their content. More and more companies are paying to develop a “sonic identity...

Bjarne Caesar Skinnerup works as a maritime pilot in the straits of Denmark. That means he’s used to seeing oil tankers. But after the start of the war in Ukraine, the tankers started getting weird. T...

In 1975, New York City ran out of money. For a decade it had managed to pay for its hundreds of thousands of city employees and robust social services by taking on billions of dollars in debt. But eve...