Planet Money

Planet Money is an NPR economics podcast launched in September 2008 by hosts Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. The project started after the pair produced an episode on the subprime mortgage crisis for the radio show This American Life in May 2008.

In May 2013, the podcast raised $590,000 on Kickstarter from 24,000 backers to manufacture and follow a cotton shirt through the global textile trade. Team members traveled to Mississippi to observe cotton harvesting, tracked yarn spinning in Indonesia, and documented garment assembly in Colombia and Bangladesh. In November 2016, the hosts bought 100 barrels of crude oil directly from a well in Kansas for $4,985 to follow petroleum refining and distribution. National Public Radio adapted portions of these stories for audiences on Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

In November 2017, NPR launched a daily spin-off podcast titled The Indicator from Planet Money, delivering economic explanations in episodes lasting under ten minutes. The team added an educational miniseries called Planet Money Summer School in August 2020, focusing on concepts in finance, government policy, and investing. In May 2021, the podcast acquired the public-domain comic book character Micro-Face to examine intellectual property and merchandising, resulting in an audio serial and a printed comic book in 2022. Standard episodes use narrative reporting and field interviews to explain market forces through individual experiences.

In 2014, the reporting team won a News and Documentary Emmy Award in the New Approaches category for multimedia reporting on the garment project. The work also received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2015. On stage, the hosts held live theater events in New York in 2012, staging practical economic experiments before ticketed audiences. In 2023, the Podcast Academy presented the podcast with an Ambie Award for Best Business Podcast. The audio catalog reached episode 1,500 in December 2023, concluding with an exploration of government bond auctions.