Planet Money

Fashion Fair was the first big national brand to make makeup for Black women, but it slowly faded into obscurity. Now that it's relaunched, can it compete in an industry it helped create? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Corporate profits are soaring. So are prices. Can corporations just not raise prices? Would that fight inflation? We examine this theory making the rounds. Then, we go inside the pipes of the economy to see how mortgage rates connect to that recent rate hike by the Federal Reserve. | Subscribe to our sister podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. It's daily, and always less than 10 minutes.

What a business that makes ramps for wiener dogs teaches us about the massive power of tech giants. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

An American business owner with employees in Russia extracts her colleagues from the country. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Behind the scenes at a new kind of grocery store that promises delivery in minutes. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

After World War II devastated the global economy, there was a push for a new universal currency. This is the story of how the U.S. dollar won. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Three stories about how the sanctions imposed on Russia are playing out – for regular Russian people, for Russia's super-rich, and for Russia's energy exports. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The U.S. is putting Russia's defense plan against sanctions to the test. Meanwhile, Russia's role as a huge exporter of oil and natural gas could cause ripple effects throughout the global economy. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The U.S. is imposing economic sanctions on Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine. But Russia has spent years trying to make its economy immune to sanctions. So, will these new sanctions be enough? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Two stories about the effects of inflation on the economy. We meet a gig worker who's seen an increase in wages, but because of inflation, how much of that increase in earnings is an illusion? Then, we break down how the Federal Reserve is planning to fight inflation. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

It's time for another round of "Planet Money Predictions!" Economic forecasters square off to predict the future of inflation and explain what's going on in the economy.| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Hormel Foods makes SPAM, and for generations, the company also created jobs for families in Austin, Minnesota. Today, the story of a labor strike that threatened to tear one small town apart. (This episode was made in collaboration with The Experiment podcast.) | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Recycling most plastic doesn't work. It never has. In 2020, we ran an episode showing how big oil companies misled the public into thinking plastic would be recycled. That episode just won a duPont-Columbia award. Here it is. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

We profess our love for our curiosities, obsessions, and the things we wish we'd thought of first. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In 2016, thieves tried to steal nearly a billion dollars from the Bank of Bangladesh's reserves without ever entering the building. And six years later, justice hasn't been so SWIFT. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

How war bonds, controlled prices, and a national network of nosy neighbors helped beat inflation during WWII. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Despite costing the same price, a pack of peanut butter M&M's weighs 0.06 ounces less than a pack of milk chocolate M&M's. A trade secret explains why. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Spider-Man isn't the first film franchise to be rebooted over and over again. But the infamous off-screen drama between Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures explains why it happens so frequently. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Two stories about people trying to overcome supply chain challenges. We follow a ship that is forced to get creative to bypass clogged ports, and we visit a warehouse that is running out of space. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

When Soul Train first launched in 1970, Black audiences weren't understood as a viable target market. Don Cornelius changed that forever with his weekly TV dance show. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.