Planet Money

→ WHAT IT COVERS Urban tree protection laws across U.S. cities are redrawing property rights boundaries. Portland homeowner Sarah Bond was denied a permit to remove a 100-foot leaning Douglas fir, which later collapsed on her house. A parallel legal battle in Canton, Michigan reached the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, reshaping how permit fees can be calculated. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Urban Tree Permit Systems:** Hundreds of U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines two housing affordability levers: whether restricting corporate landlords actually reduces costs, and how the near-elimination of single room occupancy buildings since the 1970s removed roughly one million ultra-affordable housing units from American cities. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Corporate landlord scale:** Institutional investors account for under 1% of national home purchases, making them a minor factor in housing costs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS The $70 billion U.S. supplement industry operates under regulations so lax that companies need not prove products work or contain labeled ingredients before selling them. Planet Money explores how a 1994 law, consumer backlash, and a jellyfish memory pill expose the regulatory gaps enabling this fast-growing market. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Label language as a red flag:** When a supplement label says "supports" or "promotes" a function — such as "supports metabolism" instead of...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money and Hyperfixed investigate why three Wetzel's Pretzels locations operate within one minute's walking distance inside Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center Station. The episode traces the economics of impulse-purchase franchising through Wetzel's corporate strategy and franchisee Ricky Alom's 17-location pretzel business. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Impulse vs. Destination Spectrum:** Products fall on a spectrum from pure impulse to pure destination purchases.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money investigates how a Peruvian plant-based protein called Terra Flower entered the U.S. food supply without FDA knowledge, poisoned hundreds of people, caused 42 gallbladder removals, and exposed the GRAS loophole that allows companies to self-certify new chemical additives as safe without government review. → KEY INSIGHTS - **The GRAS Loophole Scale:** 99% of chemicals currently in U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the full lifecycle of the Malta pension loophole — how tax lawyers exploited a 2008 US-Malta tax treaty to shelter billions in capital gains, how the IRS fought to close it via the "dirty dozen" list and a proposed disclosure rule, and how the effort stalled under the Trump administration. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Loophole anatomy:** Tax loopholes often emerge from ambiguous treaty language, not deliberate fraud.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money travels to Manaus, Brazil — a 2-million-person manufacturing city built in the Amazon rainforest through 1967 government tax incentives — to examine why Brazil's industrialization strategy stalled, and what the "middle income trap" means for developing economies seeking a path to prosperity. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Middle Income Trap:** World Bank economists identified that most countries stall after reaching middle-income status.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines why the U.S. is the only wealthy nation with zero federally mandated paid vacation days, tracing the historical, political, and structural reasons Americans work more weeks per year than counterparts in Europe, Australia, and Japan, and why workers forfeit hundreds of millions of earned vacation days annually. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Global vacation gap:** Every wealthy nation except the U.S. legally mandates paid vacation.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines Jerome Powell's tenure as Fed chair on his final day, tracing the history of Federal Reserve independence through three defining case studies — William McChesney Martin, Arthur Burns, and Powell — while identifying concrete signals to monitor as Trump-nominated Kevin Warsh assumes leadership of the central bank.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces OPEC's origins from a 1959 secret meeting under a Nile riverbank tree, explains how the cartel controls global oil prices through production quotas and swing production, and examines why the UAE's 2025 departure is unlikely to lower prices at the pump anytime soon. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Cartel formation mechanics:** OPEC formed in 1960 as a direct counter to the "Seven Sisters" — seven American and European oil companies (including Gulf, Shell, Texaco) that...

→ WHAT IT COVERS WNBA veteran Alicia Clark, age 38, leads player negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement, securing a 20% revenue share model — the first in women's professional sports history — after eight days of hotel negotiations in March 2025, backed by Nobel laureate economist Claudia Goldin's salary analysis. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Revenue Share vs. Fixed Salary:** Tying compensation to a fixed growth rate rather than revenue share means workers lose ground as a business scales.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Curt Flood's 1969 lawsuit against Major League Baseball's reserve clause — which bound players to teams indefinitely — traces how one player's legal battle, stretching to the Supreme Court, shifted labor economics in professional sports and ultimately doubled players' share of league revenues by the mid-1970s. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Monopsony in labor markets:** When only one buyer exists for labor — as with MLB's reserve clause — workers are systematically underpaid.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money documents its first book launch while investigating how the New York Times bestseller list actually works — revealing a system built on secret methodology, historical manipulation tactics, bulk-buying schemes, scarlet dagger penalties, and a live tour strategy that landed the book at number three on the nonfiction list. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Bestseller List Mechanics:** The NYT bestseller list is legally classified as editorial content protected under the First...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Spirit Airlines, once America's fastest-growing ultra-low-cost carrier, faces potential liquidation after a second bankruptcy filing. The episode traces Spirit's rise under CEO Ben Baldanza's "Dollar General of airlines" model, then examines how legacy carriers copied budget pricing, weaponized loyalty programs, and rising costs collectively dismantled the budget airline sector.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces how the U.S. rare earths industry collapsed from a Molycorp monopoly at California's Mountain Pass mine in the 1960s to China controlling 90% of global processing today, and examines the U.S. government's current multi-billion dollar effort to rebuild domestic rare earth supply chains. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Industrial policy replication:** China's rare earths dominance was built through four specific policy levers: preferential low-cost government financing,...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark speaks at a Planet Money live event in San Francisco, addressing AI's trajectory toward replacing complex human work by April 2027, the economic redistribution problem this creates, and behavioral economist Daryl Fairweather explains how single-family zoning reform and musical-chairs housing dynamics affect affordability.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces how Kalshi, a prediction market platform, fought regulators to legalize betting on elections, sports, and world events by classifying wagers as futures contracts rather than gambling. The company now operates in all 50 states and projects a trillion-dollar industry within four years. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Legal classification arbitrage:** Kalshi secured federal legitimacy by convincing the CFTC to classify yes/no event bets as derivatives swaps rather than...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz during a US-Iran war, tracing how 20% of global oil supply gets cut off and what a potential toll system means for the future of global trade. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Strait of Hormuz toll system:** Iran's Revolutionary Guard (Sepah Navy) operates a permission-based transit system requiring ships to submit vessel name, flag country, cargo details, and crew nationality.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the commercial journey of its own book through the publishing supply chain, revealing how independent bookseller Fisher Nash at Carmichael's in Louisville evaluates 12,000–15,000 titles per season in 30-second windows, and how Norton's sales director Steven Pace manages print runs, returns, and retail distribution across every channel from airports to cruise ships.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Pete Stavros, a KKR private equity partner, runs an 85-company experiment giving hourly workers equity stakes in their employers. Starting in 2011 with a Minnesota safety equipment manufacturer, the program has created ownership stakes for over 190,000 workers, with some employees receiving six-figure payouts upon company sales. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Worker Equity Communication:** Announcing ownership stakes at acquisition—not silently at sale—drives measurably higher engagement...