Planet Money
Summary: Money makes the world go around, faster and faster every day. On NPR's Planet Money, you'll meet high rollers, brainy economists and regular folks -- all trying to make sense of our rapidly changing global economy.
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- Artist: NPR
- Copyright: 2015 National Public Radio
Podcasts:
One night, Lariat Alhassan heard an ad on the radio. It said the Nigerian government was offering millions of dollars to people with business ideas, practically no strings attached. She gave it a go.
In New York City, more than 5,000 food trucks and carts compete for the business of hungry office workers. And finding the right spot to set up shop can mean the difference between fortune and ruin.
To serve Muslim customers, a bank in Michigan tried to comply with both U.S. regulations and Islamic law. One problem: Islamic law prohibits charging interest.
On today's show, we open up some of those annoying pharmaceutical spam emails and find out who's clicking to buy herbal viagra? Also, what happens when they do?
Beer. Water. Pretzels. It takes effort, strategy, and some serious lungs to sell expensive junk food at a baseball game. Meet the hot dog vending legend of Fenway Park.
To get to the other side... where there are millions of dollars in tax breaks.
Housing subsidies are often given out through a lottery. But why do we let random chance decide who gets help with the rent? We don't do that for food stamps or health care, so why housing?
In this episode, we consider a world where everybody cheats, and where you can't win unless you game the regulators: Professional cycling.
When you're an employer looking at a giant stack of resumes, you have to find some way to quickly narrow the field. How do you do that fairly? And what happens when your good intentions backfire?
We talk to Kid Rock about how he tried to cut scalpers out of the business — and still sell cheap tickets to his shows.
The modern class action was created on a typewriter in the back of a car. (Sort of.) Now, thousands of these lawsuits are filed every year. How did we get here? Is this really a good way to do things?
Credit cards with chips in them have been around for four decades. So why is America only getting them now? And now that they are here, why are so few places using them?
Imagine a safer kind of gun. Imagine a company with a plan to build it. Imagine customers ready to buy it. Imagine what could go wrong. A whole lot.
A California mall straddles the border between two cities — and the minimum wage is higher on one side.
Puerto Rico is part of the United States, but not one of the United States. And this limbo status has brought a world of economic trouble.