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Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy. At Planet Money, we explore the forces that shape our lives and bring you along for the ride. Don't just understand the economy – understand the world.

Wanna go deeper? Subscribe to Planet Money+ and get sponsor-free episodes of Planet Money, The Indicator, and Planet Money Summer School. Plus access to bonus content. It's a new way to support the show you love. Learn more at plus.npr.org/planetmoney


Planet Money

The U.S. government spends a ton of money, on everything from Medicare to roads to defense. In fact, it spends way more than it takes in. So…it borrows money, in the bond market. By selling U.S. Treasurys, basically IOUs with periodic interest payments. And for decades, people have loved to invest in Treasurys, for their safety and security. 

But lately, Treasurys have started to look riskier. 

In part because, in recent years, there’s a new buyer at the table: hedge funds, those loosely-regulated financial companies that invest on behalf of institutions and wealthy clients. They have started doing a special trade called the “Treasury basis trade.” And, depending on who you talk to, this trade could destabilize our entire financial system. Or help the U.S. government borrow more money. Or both. 

On the latest episode: how and why are hedge funds getting into Treasurys? We follow how a Treasury travels from the nest into the hands of hedge funds. And we speak to someone from one of those hedge funds, about what they’re doing and why.

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This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Kenny Malone. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our Executive Producer. 

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How the government got hedge funded

Pre-order the Planet Money book here for your free gift. 

Our sister show, The Indicator, is chronicling the evolving business of crime for its Vice Week series. Today, we bring to you two cases of crime in the age of AI. 

First, cybercriminals are using our own voices against us. Audio deepfake scams are picking up against individuals but also against businesses. We hear from a bank on how they’re adapting defenses, and find out how the new defenses are a game of AI vs AI. 

Then, we move over to the stock market to witness AI market manipulation. A new breed of trading bots behave differently. They could collude with each other, even without human involvement or instruction, so researchers are asking how to think about blame, and regulation in a world of more sophisticated trading bots. That’s assuming regulators could even keep up with the tech in the first place. 

Indicator Vice Series 
Head to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast feed for the latest on the Indicator Vice Series including an episode on data breaches . If you don’t already subscribe, check it out. Each episode explains one slice of the economy connected to the news recently, always in 10 minutes or less. 

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This episode is hosted by Darian Woods, Adrian Ma, and Wailin Wong. These episodes of The Indicator were originally produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon is The Indicator’s editor. Alex Goldmark is the Executive Producer. 

Music: NPR Source Audio - “Diamond High” 

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Two ways AI is changing the business of crime (Two Indicators)

It’s here! It’s free to download and playtest! It’s the Planet Money game! (Download here.)
Download and playtest the game go here • 
Sign up for the 11/1 virtual AMA event and get updates about the gameSubmit your feedback on the gameWatch the how-to video with Kenny and Elan for playtest instructionsIn this episode, the story of how we arrived here. Ride along as our game-making partners at Exploding Kittens help us turn our (sometimes wild) economics game ideas into the next blockbuster game. It’s a behind the scenes look at how to design a game from scratch — a game that is somehow filled with economics, impossible to put down, but does not feel like you’re cramming for school. Which is… harder than we thought.

After months of trying to find the perfect balance of ideas and entertainment, the Planet Money game is ready for our next phase. And that’s where you come in, listeners! We need you to playtest the Planet Money game to help us perfect it.

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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BOARD GAMES 2: Making our prototype

We want to make a board game. It must, of course, teach the world about economics. It must be fun. It’d be nice if it sold lots of copies! How hard could that be!? (Monopoly and Catan are hugely popular and basically little economy simulators, after all.)

Well, turns out, it’s quite hard!

We’re in a golden age of tabletop games. Thirty years ago there were around 800 new games each year. Now it is more like 5,000. Just a handful of those get to be hits. 

In the first episode of our new series, Planet Money sets forth on an epic quest to beat the odds. 

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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BOARD GAMES 1: We're making a game

The next time you open your fridge, take a second to behold the miracles inside of it: Raspberries from California, butter from New Zealand, steak from Nebraska. None of that would have been remotely possible before the creation of the cold chain. 

The cold chain is the name for the end-to-end refrigeration of our food from farm to truck to warehouse to grocery store and ultimately to our fridges at home. And it’s one of the great achievements of the modern world. 

On today’s show, Nicola Twilley, food journalist and author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, tells us the story of how our world got cold, and what that’s meant for the economy. 

We’ll hear about two pioneers of cold: The cheapskate meat baron Gustavus Swift, and the train-hopping chemist Polly Pennington. And we’ll take a look at whether all this refrigeration might have created some new problems. 

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Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Nick Fountain and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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How refrigeration took over the world

On Wall Street, fortunes are often won and lost with the tiniest advantages. And for the past few years, one trading firm has stood out from the rest for both huge profits and careful secrecy — Jane Street Group.

But last year, one of Jane Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading strategies was unexpectedly revealed in a Manhattan courtroom. The news ricocheted around the world. It drew the attention of competitors and regulatory agencies, destabilized billions of dollars worth of trades, and called into question some of the most fundamental strategies in global finance. 

Some Planet Money episodes about finance:
 - The rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management
 - How George Soros forced the UK to devalue the pound

Further reading: 
 - Jane Street Group, LLC v. Millennium Management LLC, Douglas Schadewald, and Daniel Spottiswood
 - “Jane Street’s Indian Options Trade Was Too Good,” from Bloomberg
 - SEBI's report: "Interim Order in the matter of Index manipulation by Jane Street Group"
 - “Jane Street Defends India Trading Activity, Blasts Regulator,” from Bloomberg

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This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Mary Childs. It was produced by Eric Mennel, with production help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Cooper Katz-McKim. It was edited by Jess Jiang. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Planet Money’s executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

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How Jane Street’s secret billion-dollar trade unraveled

Israel has been blocking the flow of physical money into Gaza since the start of the war. So whatever paper cash was in Gaza before the war, that’s all that’s been circulating. It's falling apart from overuse. 

Two best friends, one in Gaza and one in Belgium, are now trying to get money in.

But how do you get money into a bank account in Gaza? And how do you get that money out, in Gaza, when there are no functioning banks or ATMs? And almost no electricity. And spotty internet. And what is there to buy? How does money even work in Gaza right now? 

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This episode was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune, and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo, Robert Rodriguez, and James Willetts. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. 

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In Gaza, money is falling apart

(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016.)

It’s no secret that CEOs get paid a ton – and a ton more than the average worker. More than a hundred times than what their average employee makes. 

But it wasn’t always this way. So, how did this gap get so vast? And why? 

On today’s episode … we go back to a specific moment when the way CEOs were paid got changed. It involves Bill Clinton's campaign promises, and Silicon Valley workers taking to the streets to protest an accounting rule. And of course, Dodd Frank. 

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This episode was hosted by Jacob Goldstein and Stacey Vanek Smith, and was originally produced by Nick Fountain. This update was reported and produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Alex Goldmark.

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When CEO pay exploded (update)

Last month, President Donald Trump announced an unusual deal. Intel, the biggest microchip maker in America, had agreed to give the United States a 10 percent stake in its business. That means the U.S. government is now Intel's largest shareholder — and a major American company is now a partially state-owned enterprise. 

This deal has raised a lot of eyebrows. The U.S. government almost never gets tangled up with businesses like this. Some have accused the president of taking a step toward, well, socialism.

But the Intel deal didn’t come out of nowhere. It's actually the latest chapter in one of the most aggressive economic experiments the United States has ever attempted. An experiment that Trump is now taking in a surprising new direction. 

On today's show, we unpack the Intel deal. Where did it come from, and what does it say about President Trump’s unconventional approach to managing the economy. 

For more:
 - The President's Golden Share in U.S. Steel 
 - Bringing a tariff to a graphite fight 
 - A controversial idea at the heart of Bidenomics

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Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.

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This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Keith Romer. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Jimmy Keeley with help from Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. 

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The U.S. now owns a big chunk of Intel. That’s a huge deal.

There’s one question we seem to be hearing everywhere: “Is my job safe from AI?” 

Dozens of you, our listeners, have written to us about this. Saying things like, “Maybe my yoga teacher side gig is actually my safest bet now,” and “My parents were in real estate, and I never thought I’d say it ... but maybe that’s what I should do?” 

If only there were a list that could tell you which jobs are safe from AI. We go looking for that list … and find that the AI future is going to be even weirder than we’d imagined.

Today on the show: We talk to two researchers who have come up with some first drafts of the future. We learned more about the machines that might be coming for our jobs, and also, more about what it actually means to be human.

Further Reading:
 - GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact potential of LLMs
 - The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work

Subscribe to Planet Money+

Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.

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Today’s episode was produced by Eric Mennel and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. 

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Asking for a friend … which jobs are safe from AI?

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 Trump enacted a heap of import taxes in his first term, in particular on goods from China. President Biden's administration largely kept those tariffs in place, and levied new tariffs as well, on electric vehicles and solar panels.

And now, as Trump's second presidency is on the horizon, he has promised even more tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China, and even on all imports across the board.

And now, as Trump's second presidency is on the horizon, he has promised even more tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China, and even on all imports across the board.

We update this classic episode about the Smoot Hawley Tariffs, and review the impact of more recent efforts from Trump and Biden alike.

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Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (update)

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