Planet Money

It's another extremely dry, hot summer for the American West. Our daily podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money, brings us two stories about the water shortage in the West with economic ideas that may help. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In the last class of Planet Money Summer School Season 2, we cover one more important market — cryptocurrency. If you're thinking about investing in crypto, do you know exactly what it is that you're buying? Or how it should (if at all) fit alongside the rest of your investments? | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. | Don't forget to take the Summer School Final Quiz.

The work of our first Black economist was lost to history. Professor Nina Banks set out on a quest to find it. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Investing during a bubble can leave you bust. But how to tell the difference between a bubble before it bursts and an investing rocket ship taking off? We'll run through a historical example and look inside our own thinking to find the mental biases that can contribute or exacerbate bad bubble thinking. | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

It's Stacey vs Greg in a face off on the future of the office. Each takes a side, armed with studies, historical examples, theories on efficiency and happiness and from their closet studios, they bring their indicators for the future of the office. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. And our daily podcast The Indicator hosted by Stacey here.

A few years back, Cardiff asked for an unusual Christmas present: a junk bond... Parallel to the stock market, the bond market offers different levels of risk and reward. In this class, what is a bond, how do they differ from stocks, and how do they help companies grow? | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

There are a lot of fancy terms for the things we experience — but are they really useful? Yes! We explain four social-science terms that can help us understand our world. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Even if you don't own stocks, there are a lot of reasons to care about investing. We meet some of the folks left out of the stock market who deploy sophisticated economic thinking, even creating their own alternate financial systems. Our professors help us understand how consumption smoothing and life-cycle hypothesis apply to personal finance. And we meet the creator of the 401(k). | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

We find out what happens when big investors spend billions of dollars buying mobile home parks and make them less affordable for the people who live there. Then we learn how the government helps them do it, with super low-cost loans that were meant to support affordable housing. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In 2006, Warren Buffett bet a million dollars that the most brainless, boring investment around would do better than the researched, handpicked investments of some of the smartest hedge fund managers in the world. The second class of Summer School looks at how that bet played out, the origins of the index fund, and why it's so hard to beat the market. Returning to the underlying theme of risk and reward, we also discuss how diversification reduces risk. | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

America's housing shortage has been decades in the making. A lot of people blame Baby Boomers — but is it really their fault? We unpack three big reasons for the shortage. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The first class of Planet Money Summer School starts off with a field trip. With the help of a cow, two economists, and three cute animals, we learn what a stock is and how stocks are priced, and we begin to see the psychological forces that make prices move up and down on the stock market. Keep an eye out throughout for our big theme for the course this summer: risk and reward. | Watch this Tik Tok to learn more and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Last year, one of the biggest banks accidentally paid off a client's loan to its lenders — a $900 million mistake. Some of the recipients wouldn't give the money back. And then a surprising court ruling affirmed their no give-back. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Two groups of people who would never meet in real life collide in a world of wizards and dragons. They battle it out in a low-tech video game, and it shakes the lives of a lot of real people living in a collapsing economy. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

For much of the 1970s inflation was bad. Prices rose at over 10 percent a year. Nothing could stop it — until one powerful person did something very unpopular. Today's show: How we beat inflation. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.