Planet Money

On today's Planet Money, we discuss high-frequency trading, in which people program computers to buy and sell stocks in quick succession under certain, pre-defined circumstances. The idea is to profit from fleeting changes in the price of a stock. High-frequency traders include big banks and tiny little companies. And they're all trying to be even faster than each other. A few years back, all the high-frequency traders were trying to get a one-millisecond edge over everybody else. Today, they're angling for a one-microsecond edge.

In India, there are a handful of billionaires, and 400 million people without electricity. On today's Planet Money, we ask the question: With India's economy growing at 8 percent per year, why are so many people there still so poor? We hear from economists, and from Umrao Singh, a 75-year-old cobbler who lives on the street in Delhi.

This is the first episode in a new series we're trying out. The Planet Money Deep Read will feature in-depth conversations with big thinkers. Today on the Planet Money Deep Read, we talk with Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, about his new book: The End of the Free Market.

Back in the '80s, Kay Fishburn had a dream: Americans would band together and make voluntary donations to the government to bring the national debt way down. She became something of a minor celebrity. On today's Planet Money, we check in with Fishburn. And we talk to an economist, who explains why it would be a bad idea for Americans to raid their savings accounts to pay off the national debt. It's all part of our ongoing quest to understand this whole gifts-to-pay-down-the-debt thing.

On today's podcast, we take a field trip to Barney's. (Do you have any idea what they charge for a t-shirt there?) Our guide is Claire Hamilton, a trend analyst at a company called WGSN. And we talk to Ed Jay, a senior VP at American Express. He gathered data about 100,000 people who used their AmEx card to donate to public radio, and told us what other kind of stuff they bought.

"When this bill becomes law, the joyride on Wall Street will come to a screeching halt," Harry Reid said last week, after the Senate passed its big finance reform bill. Today on Planet Money, we dig into the "Volcker Rule" -- the bill's ostensible ban on banks trading with their own money. And we look at the question: Will the joyride really come to a screeching halt? And would it be a good thing if it did?

We bought her for $1,000 early this year. The mortgages she's made of were going sour at an alarming rate. When enough of the mortgages went bad, she would die. On today's Planet Money: Toxie -- Planet Money's mortgage-backed toxic asset -- is in a coma.

During the credit boom, lots of payday loan stores sprang up in Mansfield, Ohio. You'd expect that all those companies would have competed with each other, driving down interest interest rates for borrowers, But that didn't happen; they all charged, basically, the same price. The lack of competition may have been the unintended consequence of a law that was supposed to protect borrowers.

There's this weird thing in the movie business: Almost all movies lose money. Except they don't, really. On today's Planet Money, Edward Jay Epstein, the author of a recent book called The Hollywood Economist, explains the business of movies. As a case study, he walks us through the numbers for "Gone In 60 Seconds." (It starred Angelina Jolie and Nicolas Cage. They stole cars. Don't pretend like you don't remember it.)

In Athens, everybody has a story about how easy it was to borrow money after Greece joined the euro and interest rates plummeted. On today's Planet Money, Chana Joffe-Walt brings back a few of those tales. Her cab driver upgraded from a Toyota to a Mercedes. Paul Emmanuelides, who owned a couple bars, borrowed 7 million euros to build an industrial brewery. People borrowed money to go on vacation -- then refinanced the loans. "It was like manna from heaven," one lady says. Where did all the money come from? A lot of it came from Newport Beach, home of the giant bond fund Pimco. Adam Davidson was there last week, and he spoke with Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco's CEO.

First, an NYU finance professor talks about yesterday's wild market swings. Turns out, a sort of "circuit breaker" that's supposed to settle the market may have backfired. Then, we go behind the scenes at Standard & Poor's to answer a question that's been on our mind lately: How do you rate a country? Also answered in the podcast: Do agencies think twice before lowering a country's rating to junk?

So Maria Bartiromo let her trademarks lapse on "Money Honey." Sensing a huge opportunity to make a killing in the visor business, we swooped in and applied for our own Money Honey trademark. You can read the application here, on the Web site of the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. It's good for caps and visors, as well as "headbands against sweating." We were super excited, until we talked to a few intellectual property lawyers. They told us that a trademark isn't enough. There's this whole other thing called a "right of privacy."

In Jamaica, people don't fear the tax collector. On today's Planet Money, we hear from Kimala Bennett, an entrepreneur who decided that should change. Her goal is to get all the Jamaican entrepreneurs who think of themselves as hustlers to straighten up and turn into proper business people. Her inspiration, naturally, is CNBC's Donny Deutsch.

David Kestenbaum tries to figure out why there's so much bureaucracy in India. He comes up with a few possible answers — legacy of colonialism, pretext for bribery, machinery of democracy. He also brings back a few pictures of red tape in action.

Gagan Singh was 22 years old when he started a small business in Delhi, India, delivering telephone and Internet service. To get the business going, he needed to string up some wires and get licenses from the government. To make that happen, he had to start bribing people. Singh had to bribe, basically, everybody: the lineman, the junior engineer, the senior engineer, their bosses. He hated it it. He didn't even want to be a businessman; he wanted to be an artist.