Jacob Goldstein

What the fine print in my policy says about how insurance works.

A new SuperPAC aims to reduce the influence of big money in politics — and it's starting by raising millions of dollars, in part from wealthy donors.

Money market accounts are so dull that many people use them like checking accounts. But they're riskier than checking accounts, and federal regulators are proposing new rules to deal with those risks.

At the movies, a ticket to a sold-out blockbuster costs the same as a ticket to a bomb playing in an empty theater. Jacob Goldstein of the Planet Money team finds out why.

Simple wooden pallets make transporting items, loading and unloading easier. Our Planet Money team dives deep into the pallet world to see how this ubiquitous item is changing.

Banks lend our money out, and that money can be lost if the bank collapses. One radical solution to this problem is to get rid of the banks. Peer-to-peer lending outfits offer a previ...

The European Central Bank became the first major central bank to announce a negative interest rate. The ECB is trying to encourage spending in the eurozone, which has been mired in ultralow inflation.

The penny occupies a strange spot in our economy — it's worth almost nothing. Our Planet Money Team goes on an expedition through the streets of Manhattan to find something they can buy for one cent.

With the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the economy the past several years, why has inflation remained so low?

A typical UPS truck now has hundreds of sensors on it. That's changing the way UPS drivers work — and it foreshadows changes coming for workers throughout the economy.

Jacob Goldstein from the Planet Money team reports on a big, buzz-worthy new book from one of the world's leading experts on inequality.

Until the Great Depression, nobody talked about "the economy." In a sense, it hadn't been invented yet.

Ben Horowitz is a big-time venture capitalist. His firm invested in Facebook and Twitter. More recently, his firm invested some $50 million in startups related to bitcoin, the virtual currency that works like online cash. Ben thinks bitcoin is going to change the way ...

Over the past 50 years, both the way the federal government spends money and what the government spends money on has changed a lot.

It used to be that most spending was what wonks call "discretionary spending." This is money that has to be approved every year by Congress.

Today, ...

This just in from the AP:

With its meticulous criminal craftsmen, cheap labor and, by some accounts, less effective law enforcement, Peru has in the past two years overtaken Colombia as the No. 1 source of counterfeit U.S. dollars, says the U.S. Secret Service, protector of the ...

Update, Sept. 4: We added the audio for David Kestenbaum's radio obituary of Ronald Coase.

If you created the world as a simple economic thought experiment, companies wouldn't exist. Instead, everybody would work for themselves, and they'd be constantly selling their labor (or the fruits of their labor, or use ...

For more of our reporting on this story, please see our recent column in the New York Times Magazine, and the latest episode of This American Life.

This morning, we reported on a charity called GiveDirectly that's trying to help poor people in the ...

There are no strings attached. People can spend the money on whatever they want, and they never have to pay it back.

Jess Jiang and Robert Smith just got to Jakarta, where cotton is being spun into yarn for the Planet Money men's T-shirt. They'll be posting photos on our new T-shirt Tumblr — assuming they don't spend their whole trip stuck in traffic. #seedtoshirt

Earlier this year, we reported:

Ecuador's Yasuni National Park is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. But there's a complication: The park sits on top of the equivalent of millions of barrels of oil.

This creates a dilemma.

Ecuador prides itself on being pro-environment. Its ...