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The U.S. Constitution famously outlaws “cruel and unusual punishments.” But there's another, far more obscure part of the Constitution called the Excessive Fines Clause, which basically says that the fine has to fit the crime. So far, the Supreme Court has been pretty mysterious about what that means. But for Ken Jouppi, the fate of his $95,000 plane hinges on it.
Ken is a bush pilot. He used to run an air taxi service in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 2012, police caught one of Ken’s passengers with a six-pack of Budweiser in her luggage. Over that six-pack, Ken was convicted of bootlegging. As punishment, he was ordered to forfeit his $95,000 Cessna.
The Supreme Court is now considering whether to take Ken’s case. And what’s at stake here is more than just a plane. Hanging in the balance is an increasingly popular — and controversial — business model for criminal justice.
More on economics and the law:
- Fine and punishment
- The prisoner's solution
- Paying for the crime
- Rescues at sea, and how to make a fortune
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Today’s episode was produced by James Sneed and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Luis Gallo. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Ko Tagasugi Chernovin with help from Robert Rodriguez. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
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When TikTok videos started to go viral on Instagram and Reddit, TikTok turned to professional sound designers to protect their content.
More and more companies are paying to develop a “sonic identity” – a series of sounds, songs, and micro-jingles to help maintain a unified brand.
In this episode, in conjunction with the sound design podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, we hear the backstory to possibly the most successful audio branding campaigns in history. It’s a tale of guerilla marketing and the power of sonic suggestion.
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This adapted episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Dallas Taylor. It was produced by Casey Emmerling and James Sneed. The episode was edited by Jess Jiang. Alex Goldmark is our Executive Producer.
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Bjarne Caesar Skinnerup works as a maritime pilot in the straits of Denmark. That means he’s used to seeing oil tankers. But after the start of the war in Ukraine, the tankers started getting weird. They were flying flags he’d never seen before. They were old, very old, though many had taken on new names. Something was off.
He’d stumbled on a shadow fleet of hundreds of tankers ferrying sanctioned oil out of Russia … with near impunity.
Today on the show, how those ships are transforming the global oil market and fueling the war in Ukraine. And why this all might be a financial and environmental disaster waiting to happen.
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This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Daniel Ackerman. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Kwesi Lee and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
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In 1975, New York City ran out of money. For a decade it had managed to pay for its hundreds of thousands of city employees and robust social services by taking on billions of dollars in debt. But eventually investors were no longer willing to lend the city any more money. New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy — the city shuttered more than a dozen firehouses, teachers went on strike and garbage piled up in the streets.
Rescuing the city required the cooperation of the state of New York, the banks, the city workers unions, giant property owners and … the White House. But President Gerald Ford was adamantly opposed to bailing out NYC, prompting the famous New York Daily News headline — “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
On today’s show, the story of a group of private citizens who were deputized by the state of New York to try to save the city’s finances. Led by investment banker Felix Rohatyn, the group had to put together a grand bargain that everyone would be willing to agree to, and to come up with the billions of dollars the city needed to survive.
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Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Keith Romer and Nick Fountain. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Julia Ritchey. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Cena Loffredo. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
Special Thanks: Denis Coleman, David Schleicher, Liall Clarke, Kevin Hennigan and everyone at Classical King FM in Seattle.
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The U.S. government spends a ton of money, on everything from Medicare to roads to defense. In fact, it spends way more than it takes in. So…it borrows money, in the bond market. By selling U.S. Treasurys, basically IOUs with periodic interest payments. And for decades, people have loved to invest in Treasurys, for their safety and security.
But lately, Treasurys have started to look riskier.
In part because, in recent years, there’s a new buyer at the table: hedge funds, those loosely-regulated financial companies that invest on behalf of institutions and wealthy clients. They have started doing a special trade called the “Treasury basis trade.” And, depending on who you talk to, this trade could destabilize our entire financial system. Or help the U.S. government borrow more money. Or both.
On the latest episode: how and why are hedge funds getting into Treasurys? We follow how a Treasury travels from the nest into the hands of hedge funds. And we speak to someone from one of those hedge funds, about what they’re doing and why.
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This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Kenny Malone. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our Executive Producer.
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Our sister show, The Indicator, is chronicling the evolving business of crime for its Vice Week series. Today, we bring to you two cases of crime in the age of AI.
First, cybercriminals are using our own voices against us. Audio deepfake scams are picking up against individuals but also against businesses. We hear from a bank on how they’re adapting defenses, and find out how the new defenses are a game of AI vs AI.
Then, we move over to the stock market to witness AI market manipulation. A new breed of trading bots behave differently. They could collude with each other, even without human involvement or instruction, so researchers are asking how to think about blame, and regulation in a world of more sophisticated trading bots. That’s assuming regulators could even keep up with the tech in the first place.
Indicator Vice Series
Head to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast feed for the latest on the Indicator Vice Series including an episode on data breaches . If you don’t already subscribe, check it out. Each episode explains one slice of the economy connected to the news recently, always in 10 minutes or less.
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This episode is hosted by Darian Woods, Adrian Ma, and Wailin Wong. These episodes of The Indicator were originally produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon is The Indicator’s editor. Alex Goldmark is the Executive Producer.
Music: NPR Source Audio - “Diamond High”
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It’s here! It’s free to download and playtest! It’s the Planet Money game! (Download here.)
We want to make a board game. It must, of course, teach the world about economics. It must be fun. It’d be nice if it sold lots of copies! How hard could that be!? (Monopoly and Catan are hugely popular and basically little economy simulators, after all.)
Well, turns out, it’s quite hard!
We’re in a golden age of tabletop games. Thirty years ago there were around 800 new games each year. Now it is more like 5,000. Just a handful of those get to be hits.
In the first episode of our new series, Planet Money sets forth on an epic quest to beat the odds.
Find our other episodes in the board game series, here and here.
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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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The next time you open your fridge, take a second to behold the miracles inside of it: Raspberries from California, butter from New Zealand, steak from Nebraska. None of that would have been remotely possible before the creation of the cold chain.
The cold chain is the name for the end-to-end refrigeration of our food from farm to truck to warehouse to grocery store and ultimately to our fridges at home. And it’s one of the great achievements of the modern world.
On today’s show, Nicola Twilley, food journalist and author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, tells us the story of how our world got cold, and what that’s meant for the economy.
We’ll hear about two pioneers of cold: The cheapskate meat baron Gustavus Swift, and the train-hopping chemist Polly Pennington. And we’ll take a look at whether all this refrigeration might have created some new problems.
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Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Nick Fountain and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
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On Wall Street, fortunes are often won and lost with the tiniest advantages. And for the past few years, one trading firm has stood out from the rest for both huge profits and careful secrecy — Jane Street Group.
But last year, one of Jane Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading strategies was unexpectedly revealed in a Manhattan courtroom. The news ricocheted around the world. It drew the attention of competitors and regulatory agencies, destabilized billions of dollars worth of trades, and called into question some of the most fundamental strategies in global finance.
Some Planet Money episodes about finance:
- The rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management
- How George Soros forced the UK to devalue the pound
Further reading:
- Jane Street Group, LLC v. Millennium Management LLC, Douglas Schadewald, and Daniel Spottiswood
- “Jane Street’s Indian Options Trade Was Too Good,” from Bloomberg
- SEBI's report: "Interim Order in the matter of Index manipulation by Jane Street Group"
- “Jane Street Defends India Trading Activity, Blasts Regulator,” from Bloomberg
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This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Mary Childs. It was produced by Eric Mennel, with production help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Cooper Katz-McKim. It was edited by Jess Jiang. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Planet Money’s executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
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