NPR: Planet Money Podcast

We're making a t-shirt that tells the story of its own creation. Part of that story — color. It took long meetings, late nights and endless discussion to choose the exact hues for our Planet Money t-shirt.On today's show, we'll explain what the color of our women's t-shirt has to do with this painting

Nearly 20 states have legalized marijuana to some degree. As it turns out, this has profound economic consequences for dealers all across the country.On today's show, we meet a wholesaler who moves weed across the country, a California weed dealer seeking higher profits in New York, and a special agent who may be inadvertently helping the dealer out by trying to put him in jail.For More: See

On today's show, we meet a Brazilian who took on the world's largest superpower; a Texas cotton farmer who's tired of hearing the Brazilians complain; and a guy named Renato — a.k.a. Retaliation Master.And we hear why U.S. taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton growers nearly $150 million a year.This show originally ran in 2011, near the beginning of our quest to make a Planet Money t-shirt. We're re-playing it now because we just re-launched the t-shirt project.If you wa...

We're making a t-shirt that tells the story of its own creation. To help make it happen, visit our Kickstarter page.

Sugar costs more in the U.S. than in the rest of the world. If you're in the candy business — if, say, you make 10 lollipops a day — that's a big deal.On today's show, we visit a candy factory in Ohio (where they want U.S. sugar to be cheaper) and a sugar-beet field in Minnesota (where they don't). And, perhaps inevitably, we hear from Washington, where the fight over sugar has been playing out for years.For more, read

What causes what? The human brain is programmed to answer this question constantly. This how we survive. What made that noise? Bear made that noise. What caused my hand to hurt? Fire caused my hand to hurt.We are so eager to figure what causes what — that we often get it wrong. I wore my lucky hat to the game. My team won. Therefore, my lucky hat caused my team to win.On today's show we dive deep into the world of correlation and causation with Charles Wheelan, author of the new b...

Three years ago, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a study that quickly became one of the most famous, most talked about economics papers since the financial crisis. It got so much attention because it answered a basic question everybody was asking: How much debt is too much?Reinhart and Rogoff looked at what had happened in many different countries over many years. And they found a what looked like a clear debt threshold: 90 percent. Average growth was much, much slower in countries wit...

The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income tax. For mo...

Last year, a federal program took about $60 billion from wealthier Americans and gave it to the working poor. This program — a massive redistribution of wealth --has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.On today's show, we look at a huge, often overlooked, surprisingly interesting corner of the tax code: The Earned Income Tax Credit.For more, see our story 

Since the start of the year, the Japanese yen has risen by about 12 percent against the dollar. The euro has fallen by about 1 percent.Then there's bitcoin, a virtual currency that doesn't even exist in the physical world. In the past few months, the value of bitcoin has risen by more than 1,000 percent — from less than $20 per bitcoin a few months ago to more than $200 today.On today's show, we ask: Is a skyrocketing value a good thing or a bad thing for bitcoin?