NPR: Planet Money
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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#507: The Rest Of The Story
On today's show, we follow up on a few of ...
On today's show, we follow up on a few of the stories we did in 2013.We hear what happened to a billion-dollar bet against a company that sells weight loss shakes, how a Washington marijuana shop found a bank. Also, we find the owner of a 20-year-old bat mitzvah T-shirt that traveled from Michigan to Kenya.
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#506: Bell Wars
On today's show, a story on a Christmasy theme: Handbells!But ...
On today's show, a story on a Christmasy theme: Handbells!But also, a not-so-Christmasy theme: A decades-long feud between two big bell companies, located right down the road from each other.But then, a Christmasy ending: Peace!
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#505: A Locked Door, A Secret Meeting And The Birth Of The Fed
On today's show, we tell the creation story of the ...
On today's show, we tell the creation story of the Federal Reserve — one of the most powerful financial institutions on the planet. The story includes a 70-year-old man with a bad head cold and a bunch of mistresses, a nation that's deeply ambivalent about a central bank, and a secret meeting at an island with a sketchy name.
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#504: Can Hospitals Save Money By Making Doctors Squirm?
There's one part of Obamacare that doesn't get mentioned a ...
There's one part of Obamacare that doesn't get mentioned a lot, but that could end up being a big deal. It sets up experiments in hospitals all over the country to try to figure out how to save money without lowering the quality of care.On today's show, we visit a hospital in Akron, Ohio that's engaged in one of these experiments. We sit in on a tense conversation where doctors argue about why it's so hard to start surgery on time. And we hear what happens when you change the way hospitals and doctors get paid.
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#503: Adding Up The Cost Of The Planet Money T-Shirt
Today's show is the final installment of the Planet Money ...
Today's show is the final installment of the Planet Money T-shirt project. In all, each shirt cost us about $12.42. We open up the books and explain how that breaks down — how much went to cotton, how much went to the workers in Bangladesh, and how much went places we would never have imagined.
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#502: The Afterlife Of A T-Shirt
Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the ...
Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the used clothes they get. But a lot of the clothes get sold, packed in bales and sent across the ocean in a container ship. The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year — and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa. On today's show, we visit a giant used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya to see what happens to American clothes (including, presumably, some Planet Money T-shirts) after Americans are done with them.
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#501: A Shirt, A Meat Grinder And The Book Of Everything
On today's show, the Planet Money T-shirts arrive at the ...
On today's show, the Planet Money T-shirts arrive at the Port of Miami. But they're not quite here yet. If you've ever waited at an airport to clear customs, you can understand where our shirts are now: waiting for permission to enter the country.Standing between our shirts and the rest of America is a 3,000 page book. The book is a powerful force that creates and destroys entire industries around the world. Squadrons of government agents use tools of violence and destruction to ensure that the rules laid out in the book are followed.Also, the book tells us how much we'll have to pay in taxes to import our T-shirt into the U.S.
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#500: The Humble Innovation At The Heart Of The Global Economy
On today's show: the story of an often-overlooked innovation that's ...
On today's show: the story of an often-overlooked innovation that's essential to the global economy. The innovation is a box. A big, metal box.The standard shipping container has completely transformed commerce in the past 50 years. It's part of the reason the Planet Money men's T-shirt comes from cotton grown in Mississippi, spun into yarn in Indonesia, and sewn together in Bangladesh.On today's show, we see the shipping container in action, and hear the story behind it.For much more, see the 'Boxes' chapter of our online T-shirt project.
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#499: Richard Nixon, Kimchi And The First Clothing Factory In Bangladesh
The nation of Bangladesh was created out of chaos in ...
The nation of Bangladesh was created out of chaos in the early 1970s, at a moment when millions in the country were dying from a combination of war and famine. The future looked exceedingly bleak. Abdul Majid Chowdhury and Noorul Quader were Bangladeshi businessmen who wanted to help their country. "We asked ourselves, 'What the hell do we want?' " Chowdhury recalls. The answer he and his friends arrived at: "We need employment. We need dollars." Their solution involved Richard Nixon, an obscure but hugely influential trade deal, and a cultural struggle over kimchi.
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#498: The Last T-Shirt In Colombia
The Planet Money men's T-shirts were made in Bangladesh. The ...
The Planet Money men's T-shirts were made in Bangladesh. The Planet Money women's T-shirts were made in Colombia. On today's show, we move from Bangladesh to Colombia — and we see an entirely different world. It's a world where workers make more money and work under better conditions than their counterparts in Bangladesh. But it's also a world that may not last. See all of our T-shirt stories so far.
