Can you safely reopen a business right now — and should you? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School. Planet Money Summer School has arrived at the birth of the United States and the chance to set up a whole new economy from scratch. Should there be a centralized bank? Should there be a single currency? We'll travel to two moments in the country's early history when the founders said "nope" to these questions and see what happened. First we'll witness one of the great economic battles in U.S. history – the president of the United States versus the president of the Bank of the United States – and see how the outcome ushered in an age of financial panics. Then we'll drop in on a time before the U.S. dollar existed as we know it, when you could buy things using one of about 8,000 forms of money circulating in the country. We watch as the Civil War leads to the first standard currency. Along the way, we'll learn why the cycle of economic booms and busts persists to today despite efforts to centralize America's economy throughout history. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.  Subscribe to Planet Money+ for sponsor-free episode listening in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summer School 4: Banker vs president and the birth of the dollar

Back in 2005, Burt Banks inherited a plot of old family land in Delaware. But when it came time to sell it, he ran into a problem: his neighbor had a goat pen, and about half of it crossed over onto his property. Burt asked the goats' owner to move the pen, but when neighborly persuasion failed to get the job done, he changed his strategy. He sued her. And that is when things got complicated.Protecting private property is one of the fundamental jobs of the American legal system. If you hold a deed saying you own a plot of land, it's your land. End of story. Right?But, as Burt would soon learn, the law can get really complicated when it comes to determining who actually owns something. And when goats are involved ... anything can happen.This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and Dylan Sloan and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Katherine Silva engineered this episode. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Always free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, NPR One or anywhere you get podcasts.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Music: "Fruit Salad," "Keep With It" and "Purple Sun." 

How you fight a squatting goat

Texas's energy grid is largely disconnected from the rest of the U.S. That led to disastrous consequences last year when the state's grid was overloaded during a winter storm. Back in the 1970s, one company attempted to change the system in a secret, middle-of-the-night operation. Subscribe to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney

The Midnight Connection

With over 5.5 million workers unemployed or furloughed, no other industry has been hit harder than restaurants. Yet one guy is thinking about expanding. Huh? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Restaurant From The Future

We get on a boat and go to the Federal Reserve to talk about why it may be the most important institution in the world right now. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Journey To The Center Of The Fed

Georgia's Open Question

We spend a morning at a grocery store and we ask: How much is essential work worth? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

About That Hazard Pay

Over the past decade, American companies spent billions buying back their own shares. Now they need a taxpayer rescue. Do they deserve it? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Buybacks And Bailouts

Since lockdown began, some companies are doing unexpectedly well. This episode: Farm animals, a crafty comeback, Clint Eastwood, and a story with a twist. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Making It Work

On Monday, the price of a barrel of oil in the United States fell to negative $37. That's never happened before. What's going on with the price of oil? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Negative Oil

States are scrambling to find any way to get more masks, gloves, anything. Including mass emailing people who have nothing to do with it. Enter, a man with a van. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Mask Mover

Is it worth it to shut down the economy to save lives? How do you know when to reopen it? Should we let people die to save the economy? Economists say each human life is worth about $10 million dollars. How did they get that number? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Lives Vs. The Economy

There's a brand new government program with $349 billion in aid for small businesses. The problem? It was thrown together in a week. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Big Small Business Rescue

We follow the distress from a laid-off worker, to her landlord, to the multi-trillion-dollar mortgage market. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

What If No One Pays Rent?

Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the nation, has seen everything and survived everything. But even they might not have enough beds. Here's why. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Economics Of Hospital Beds

Ventilators are the supply and demand problem of the COVID pandemic. We go inside the scramble to build more, fast. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Race To Make Ventilators

A record number of Americans filed for unemployment this week. The system isn't designed for this. What's next? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

America Unemployed

The COVID-19 rescue bill is the largest ever. Where will that money come from?  | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Where Do We Get $2,000,000,000,000?

To find out what's happening with our food, we talk to an economist, a farmer, and, of course, farmworkers. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Food And Farmworkers

Some answers: The deal with toilet paper; stock market circuit breakers; coronabucks; corporate paper &amp; how to help. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

You Asked About The Virus Economy

Neel Kashkari is the President of the Minneapolis Fed. And he's run a bailout of an economy already. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

How To Save The Economy Now

Making a test for a pandemic — which rules should you keep, and which to bend? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

How To Test A Country

The central bank is trying to prevent a health crisis from becoming a financial crisis. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Fed Fights The Virus

COVID-19 is hammering our economy. We ask three super smart economists what we should do about it. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Medicine For The Economy

Oil prices are way down. We follow the story from an outbreak in China, to a meeting in Vienna, to a small-time oilman in Kansas. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Coronavirus, Oil, and Kansas

Coronaviruses didn't come out of nowhere. They've actually been around for years. But economics makes it hard to find a vaccine. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Where's The Vaccine?

An online review turns into a fine-print nightmare — until the victims fight back. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Terms Of Service 

A wool magnate gets pulled into a fight with the government over reparations. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Reparations In New Zealand

From our daily podcast The Indicator: How Amazon Prime packages reach you so damn fast? And why Lancaster, PA became the refugee capital of America? 

Indicate This

A mysterious woman promises a financial revolution. That promise leads to greed, corruption and... a beauty pageant. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The CryptoQueen

We're sending valentines to books, ideas, and other stuff we love. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Our Valentines 2020

A farmer in California built an empire dealing raw milk. And then the Feds showed up. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Raw Milk Deal

In Barbuda, land isn't a thing you buy. It's something you just... have. Put up a fence and it's yours. But all that might change. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Island No One Owns

We re-engineer a restaurant with a consultant so good, she can move a table a few inches, and make thousands of dollars. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Trouble With Table 101

You may be owed money. The government may decide to just use it. So we go looking for it inside a little-known "lost and found" of forgotten fortunes. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Escheat Show

Our friends at Throughline dive into the life of Vladimir Putin and try to understand how he became Russia's new "tsar." | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Rise Of Putin

We team up with Vox's The Impact, to tell the story of how one man changed the way Germany – and arguably the world – uses energy. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Das Green Old Deal

Michael Milken once made $550 million in one year. Then, he went to prison. This week, the President pardoned him. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Michael Milken

We are dedicating an entire show to billboards: good and old-fashioned, or fancy and high-tech. And we put up our own. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

BILLBOARDS

We went to the American Economic Association's annual conference and asked: What's the most useful idea in economics? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

13,000 Economists. 1 Question. 

Four lessons for creating fairness from a big race in New York. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Advanced Fairness At The Marathon

A lot can happen after we put an episode out into the world. In The Rest Of The Story, we check-in on stories we've reported. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here

The Rest Of The Story, 2019

In April, 7,000 TV writers across the U.S. fired their agents. All on the same day. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Writers Revolt

Tom Whitwell made an amazing list of 52 things he learned this year. We dig into our favorite items. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Things We Learned in 2019

When air traffic controllers went on strike in 1981, Reagan gave them 48 hours to return. Labor would never be the same. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

When Reagan Broke the Unions

Getting paid twice a month is like loaning money to your boss. What if you got paid every day? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

You're Giving Your Boss A Loan

People have been arguing over the constitutionality of wealth taxes since 1794, when Washington put a tax on carriages.| Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Carriage Tax 

Blackbeard, a filmmaker, and a fight between two powerful forces in American law.  | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Pirate Videos

We've heard a lot about illegal foreign meddling in the United States elections. But what about legal foreign participation? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

What Is Foreign Interference, Anyway?

7 million Americans are at least 3 months behind on car payments. It's a record but is it a crisis? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Three Sides Of A Car Loan 

Denmark is a big exporter of human sperm. And mad cow disease may have helped. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Sperm Banks

Snakebites are common but antivenom is expensive to develop. So a doctor goes to extreme lengths to find a solution. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Snakebite 

Today on the show, economist Tyler Cowen rates the NBA, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, the humanities, your neighbors, and more.  | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Overrated Or Underrated? 

A hundred years ago, economist Arthur Cecil Pigou explained how to tax things like pollution. Countries are starting to do it. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Pigou Club

A Halloween journey into the economists' worst nightmare, an endless time loop of recession after recession after... | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

A Series Of Unfortunate Recessions 

Income pools could change the way baseball players, and maybe the rest of us, think about how we get paid. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Some-of-the-Money Ball

Fast food delivery is threatening the french fry. So a band of potato scientists go to work. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Fries Of The Future

 A man in Texas had a dream: To build a whole new kind of city, with no property tax, no debt, and a whole lot of freedom. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Liberty City 

 Sometimes we forget to mention something. And our listeners always let us know. Today on the show, we make good. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

We Should Have Mentioned That

The risk-addicted investor who made WeWork possible and changed the way startups work. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Unicorn Cowboy

Investors can fund lawsuits for profit, which gives more people access to the courts. But some worry it will warp the justice system. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Capitalism In The Courtroom 

We jog to New Jersey to bet on tennis, we solve a mystery in Las Vegas, and we venture into the world of video game loot. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Three Bets 

All over the world, interest rates are very, very low. In some places, they're negative: you lend out money, and get less back. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Interest Rates... Why So Negative? 

Hear what ordinary people told Studs Terkel about their jobs in the 70s — and what they have to say now. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.  

The Working Tapes Of Studs Terkel

Sometimes the way to help yourself is to help your enemy. After WWII, the U.S. launched what might be the most successful intervention in history, rebuilding Germany and also the rest of Western Europe. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The Marshall Plan

In the 90s, the government ran an experiment: What happens if we move people out of high-poverty neighborhoods and into low-poverty ones? Housing policy as hope? The results surprised them. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Moving To Opportunity?

Kenny takes Jacob on a nerdy quest to find the "typical American." Naturally, it ends up harder⁠—and nerdier⁠—than we planned, and the answer is more subtle than we expected. | Subscribe to our newsletter here. 

The Modal American

The top producer of Top Chef helps us spice up this food edition of listener questions. How do you master the salad bar? Why do Americans refrigerate eggs? The story of Choco Pies and more. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

You Asked For A Food Show

An inverted yield curve has predicted recessions for the past six decades. The curve is inverted right now. What does that tell us? | Subscribe to our newsletter here. 

Two Yield Curve Indicators

Helium is so special, and so rare, that the U.S. government once tried to buy it all up. And hide it. But the government's helium stockpile is running low. And we need it for MRI machines and NASA rockets. 

Find The Helium

Elephants are in danger. Counting them is crucial to saving them. But they're hard to see in the rainforest. So scientists are enlisting the help of AI technology. 

Deep Learning With The Elephants

A notorious con artist offered Felipe an IT job. He took the job —and tried to con the con man. | Plus, listen to a full double feature all about cons here.

The IT Guy Vs. The Con Artist

Scientists have studied twins for years, hoping to figure out how big a role genes play in human behavior. Our very own pair of twin reporters are on the case.

Twins

Elizabeth Warren wants to tax the wealth of the mega-rich to help fix inequality. Europe tried this, and failed. Can it work in the U.S.? 

Could A Wealth Tax Work?

In 1960, a 12-year-old boy left mainland China, hidden in the bottom of a fishing boat. He later became one of Hong Kong's richest people. His story is the story of Hong Kong. 

Hong Kong

Two highlights from our daily podcast, The Indicator, about houses. A plan to lower rents pits state against city, and a private firefighter breaks down his business for us. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

The Indicator In The House

Cities might be picking up your recyclables, but there is a very good chance they aren't being recycled. And that might be a good thing...if you really care about the planet. Part two of a two-part series.  ⎸Subscribe to our newsletter here.  

So, Should We Recycle?

In 1987, an Alabama man had an idea. So he made a deal with the mob. And ended up with 3,186 tons of trash no landfill would take. This is the accidental birth of recycling in the U.S.  ⎸Subscribe to our newsletter here.

A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle

China is building a high-tech surveillance state to capture minorities' every move and word. We go inside it and find that some Americans are involved. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter

Stuck In China's Panopticon

Teachers made a deal with the Department of Education. They kept their end of the bargain. Why didn't the government?  

Good Teachers, Bad Deal

Accidentally sending $1,500 to a stranger on Venmo reveals just how hard it is to get your money back in the new economy. 

The Cost of Getting Your Money Back 

Three stories: A tire-booting vigilante, a surge price conspiracy, and the civil rights fight over parking tickets. 

Tales From The Parking Lot

The economic recovery turns 10 this month. Don't get too comfortable. There's plenty to be worried about. 

What Should We Be Worried About?

Big cities used to be the land of opportunity for most people. But with changes in work, some economists are wondering: Are cities overrated? 

Are Cities Overrated?

People didn't always know what time it was. But in the nineteenth century, a high school principal, a scientist, and a railroad bureaucrat synchronized the nation.   

The Day Of Two Noons

Sometimes an economy can get so strong the power dynamic between bosses and workers flips: Full employment. Are we there yet? 

Quit Threat! 

Jordan Thomas is a lawyer who represents some of Wall Street's biggest whistleblowers. The life that led him here is extraordinary. 

The Whistleblower Whisperer

In which someone runs a science experiment on an actual election, on actual voters, to test the persuasive power of ethically sketchy methods. 

How To Meddle In An Election

After Donald Trump's companies declared four bankruptcies, several major banks stopped loaning him money. But Deutsche Bank didn't. 

Trump and Deutsche, A Long Affair

From renting hotels to a jobs report-like census in the night, we look at ways communities are helping the homeless. 

Counting The Homeless

James Holzhauer took data, probability and a lot of practice with a fake buzzer, and turned it into a fortune on a game show.

How Uncle Jamie Broke Jeopardy

We answer a bunch of the questions you asked — and even one you *didn't* ask. 

You Asked The Listener Question Hotline

A young economist holds a mirror up to her field. And starts a national conversation about women in economics. 

Economics, Sexism, Data

Every six hours a new dollar store opens in the U.S. Are they killing grocery stores?

Dollar Stores Vs Lettuce

The remarkable story of the online "CAPTCHA" tests we've all taken to prove that we're not robots.

I Am Not A Robot

The Indicator from Planet Money explores trade wars, peanuts, hurricanes, and happiness.

Two Spring Indicators

How a ruthless dictator, and a bunch of economists known as the Chicago Boys, took Chile from socialism to capitalism.

The Chicago Boys, Part II

In the late 1950s and early '60s a handful of Chilean students went to study economics at the University of Chicago. What they learned changed their country.

The Chicago Boys, Part I

Copyrighting comedy is expensive. So comedians have devised an informal system of sanctions to protect their jokes from theft. Sometimes it works.

Joke Theft

Some colleges are offering students a new way to pay. It's not a scholarship. It's not a loan. It's more like the students are selling stock in themselves.

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