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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#286: Libertarian Summer Camp
On today's Planet Money, we travel to a place where ...
On today's Planet Money, we travel to a place where people are trying to live without government interference. A place where you can use bits of silver to buy uninspected bacon. A place where a 9-year-old will sell you alcohol. It's the Porcupine Freedom Festival, known to its friends as PorcFest. It's the summer festival for people who think we should return to the gold standard and abolish the IRS.
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#470: Killing Fannie Mae
Five years after the financial crisis, the federal government still ...
Five years after the financial crisis, the federal government still controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant companies that guarantee trillions of dollars in mortgages. This is a huge, little-discussed part of the post-crisis economy. Almost everybody agrees that taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook when their neighbors don't pay their mortgages. But the government doesn't have a clear plan to get out of the mortgage business. Last week, two senators (a Republican and a Democrat) introduced a bill that would get rid of Fannie and Freddie and reduce the government's role in the mortgage business. On today's show, we try to figure out what the new bill means. And we revisit the story of the rise of Fannie and Freddie, which we first talked about on the show a few years back.
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#469: Rhino Horns And Clean Water
On today's show: Two stories from Kenya. 1. Poachers kill ...
On today's show: Two stories from Kenya. 1. Poachers kill rhinos for their horns. Some economists think legalizing the horns could save the rhinos. **Warning: this story contains graphic audio.** 2. . Getting clean water to people in the developing world isn't just an engineering problem.
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#468: Kid Rock Vs. The Scalpers
We live in a society full of people who are ...
We live in a society full of people who are obsessed with making sure that prices are right and supply meets demand. And then there's the live-music business. Concert tickets are often too cheap, and the supply is too limited. Scalpers are the proof: If tickets were more expensive to begin with, or if venues were bigger, scalpers wouldn't be able to charge more than face value. On today's show, we talk to Kid Rock about how he's trying to cut scalpers out of the business — and still sell cheap tickets to his shows. For More: See Adam Davidson's New York Times Magazine column, How Much Is Michael Bolton Worth to You? Read Josh Baron and Dean Budnick's book: Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped and economist Pascal Courty's many papers on the topic.
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#467: Tires, Taxes And The Grizz
The price of tires has risen by about 40 percent ...
The price of tires has risen by about 40 percent in the past five years. That's partly because rubber prices have gone up. But it's also due to a tariff that the U.S. on Chinese tire imports.As tire prices have risen, more people have been renting tires rather than buying them outright. And renting tires, it turns out, is often a bad deal in the long run.On today's show: How a celebrated attempt to help one group of people ended quietly hurting a much larger group. Also on the show: The Grizz.
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#466: DIY Finance
Mike Smith lives by himself in a small house in ...
Mike Smith lives by himself in a small house in a small town in Kentucky, near the Ohio River. He makes about $1,000 a month, owns his house outright, and doesn't carry any debt. He suspects that his brother and at least one but maybe all of his three grown children have stolen money from him.Over a period of about a year he made exactly six transactions that cost him over $100 — a property tax bill, an insurance payment, a couple big-ticket repairs. And there was the $109 he spent on a pet lizard, which he planned to use as an investment by breeding it and selling its offspring.On today's show, we look at how people create their own financial systems from scratch.Mike has thousands of dollars stashed around his house in different "accounts." Tamara Bullock and Patricia Hamilton are part of an informal savings club. Miguel Rada has a whole bank in his pocket — he takes deposits from some people and lends to others.Mike's story comes to us via the U.S. Financial Diaries Project. (His name isn't really Mike Smith, by the way; the project gave him a pseudonym so he could remain anonymous.
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#396: A Father Of High-Speed Trading Thinks We Should Slow Down
Thomas Peterffy's life story includes a typing robot, a proto-iPad, ...
Thomas Peterffy's life story includes a typing robot, a proto-iPad, and a vast fortune he amassed as one of the first guys to use computers in financial markets.On today's show, Peterffy tells us his story — and he explains why he's worried about the financial world he helped create.Also on the show: We talk with Simone Foxman of Quartz about high-speed traders paying to get a key financial indicator two seconds before everybody else.
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#465: Myanmar Opens Up
After decades of isolation, Myanmar is reconnecting with the rest ...
After decades of isolation, Myanmar is reconnecting with the rest of the world. On today's show, we meet two people who are trying to take advantage of the changes going on there. One is launching a tiny startup. The other works for Coca-Cola — a company that left Myanmar decades ago, and only returned to the country last year. For more, see our stories "Can This Man Bring Silicon Valley To Yangon?" and "How To Sell Coke To People Who Have Never Had A Sip."
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#464: When A Poor Country Gets A Lot Richer*
*Note: The country is only getting richer on paper, but ...
*Note: The country is only getting richer on paper, but that change may make a difference in the real world.*People talk about GDP as if it means something solid, as if it's a mathematically derived and agreed upon fact. But in conversations we've had in the last few weeks, we've become more convinced that GDP is a wobbly fact. It's malleable, and it's mushy.GDP can change in a day. And when it does — even when it's a statistical illusion — that illusion can still have a major impact on millions of lives.On today's show, Nigeria is about to change the way it calculates its GDP. The change will likely make Nigeria the leading economy in Africa, and it could be a big boost for the Nigerian entrepreneurs behind Pledge 51, a mobile app company based in Lagos.The guys behind Pledge 51 have found success with mobile apps like Danfo, a game which lets players pretend to drive the notoriously wild buses in Lagos. But to take their company to the next level, they want foreign investment. A boost to their country's GDP could bring in exactly the type of foreign investors they are hoping for.Correction: A previous version of this show incorrectly stated that the World Bank lends out $35 million a year. The correct number is $35 billion.
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#463: How To Get A Country To Trust Its Banks
It's something you can see on every block in most ...
It's something you can see on every block in most major cities. You probably see it every day and never give a second thought to. But in Yangon, Myanmar, an ATM is a small miracle. For decades, Myanmar was cut off from the rest of the world. There were international sanctions, and no one in the U.S. or Europe did business there. But last year, when the international sanctions started to be lifted, companies like Visa and Mastercard were excited to come in. The country has about 50 million people — that's a lot of potential customers to pay ATM fees. Setting up these machines has been a technological challenge because of the country's aging infrastructure. But there is a bigger problem with ATMs here that a lot of the international companies weren't expecting. The people in Myanmar are reluctant to use ATMs because they don't trust the banks. "The banks don't work very well," says Zeya Thu, a journalist. " Sometimes you have to bribe the staff to get your money back. So people put their money under their mattresses." Thu is a business columnist, but even he keeps his life savings at home, out of the bank. On today's show, how do you get a country to join the world economy when the people there don't even trust their own banks.
