NPR: Planet Money

Your phone rings--it looks like your neighbor's calling. But instead, it's the creepiest scam of the year.

Costco made shopping harder, and customers loved it. Now a new company is taking the Costco experience to new extremes.

Planet Money goes to Distrito Federal. With you?

When we go to the state fair, we don't go for the rides, deep-fried tacos or the butter cow. We head straight for the vendor marketplace to meet the masters of the lost art of salesmanship.

We visit the workshop of the meat inventor who came up with Steak-Umm and KFC's popcorn chicken. And we try to figure out what meat inventors tell us about patents and innovation.

Google just got hit with a multibillion-dollar antitrust fine. Here's what it tells us about competition, market power, and the biggest corporations on the planet.

We answer one of the most important questions in finance: What actually happens at the end of Trading Places?

News moves fast. Some of our best stories from this year have new chapters. Here, we catch up on three: Dirty trademarks, trading bots, and the war against the bald eagle.

Sam Cohen buys stuff at big retail stores, then turns around and sells it on Amazon for a quick profit. It defies economic logic. But somehow, there's a whole multimillion-dollar industry doing this.

Most athlete endorsements make a product more expensive. But what happens when an NBA All-Star uses his name to make a sneaker much, much cheaper? On today's show: How that worked out.

On today's show: The story of two guys who tried to cut the pay of a CEO at a small pneumatic tool company.

That meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was two decades in the making. It began in 1996, when an adventurous American went to Russia, trying to make a buck.

Bail is broken. In New Jersey, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges banded together to try a dramatic solution: Blow it up.

We run through the entire federal budget — in 10 minutes. More than $6 billion per second. Go.

We visit a company where people work on figuring out how to make stuff get cheaper.

In Washington, D.C., there is a place where millions of dollars in ripped, burned, and water-soaked dollar bills are made new. On today's show, we get inside that room.

We visited a libertarian summer paradise. What we found: People paying in gold. Exotic bacon dishes. A nine-year-old selling alcohol.

Flip-floppers, this one's for you. Changing your mind is hard, but it's one of the smartest things you can do.

What happens when an unstoppable shrimp meets an unmovable senator? A researcher goes to Washington to defend herself, her shrimp, and science itself.

Qatar was on top of the world. Seemingly overnight, it became a pariah. On this episode, we drill into a rift years in the making: It's a tale of falcons, kidnapping, and a glowing Saudi Arabian orb.

Today on the show, a businessman goes to prison, and decides he is going to disrupt the biggest captive market in America.

How a free-love commune embraced the free market and became a blockbuster brand.

The president's budget promises 3% growth. Is that doable? Yes, but he won't like what it would take.

A battle with a weed divides neighbors and leads one farmer to shoot another dead. Today's show: The hunt for a better pesticide gets way out of hand.

A man goes looking for the invisible wall that traps poor people in poverty. Finding it almost gets him killed.

You can name your business whatever you want. But the government won't register it as a trademark if it thinks it's offensive. It gets weird when you try to decide what is too offensive to trademark.

As long as there have been casinos, people have tried to cheat them. The latest attempt was by a group of hackers who tried to take down slot machines using math, iPhones, and a whole lot of swiping.

How fast is the world really changing? The answer has implications for everything from how the next generation will live to whether robots really will take all our jobs.

The creation of the electronic spreadsheet transformed industries. But its effects ran deeper than that.

What happened when India's Prime Minister declared most of the paper money in India worthless? We travel to India to see what happened after the country's demonetization.

Something incredible happened in India about six months ago. The government declared most of the paper money invalid. Demonetization they called it. Today, we meet the man who came up with the plan.

We visit a job market created by economists, for economists. It's a hyper-efficient, optimized system, tested by game theorists, tweaked by a Nobel Prize winner, but it requires comfortable shoes.

Ten years ago, two little-known hedge funds blew up, and the financial crisis was on its way. Today, we ask the person at the center of it all, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, why it happened.

Today on the show, how a New Hampshire hotel filled with boozing economists saved the global economy.

In 1838, the Maryland Jesuits sold 272 people, slaves, to pay the debts of Georgetown University. We talk with the descendants about what - if anything - they're owed.

For the residents of a small Louisiana town, there's always been a question about their past: How'd they get there? Solving the mystery only raised more questions.

Where do holidays like National Potato Chip Day and Argyle Day come from? We trace the roots of one made-up holiday until we find out who is running the global holiday machine.

One in three American jobs require a license. Today on the show, why those licensing rules hurt the U.S. economy.

One man figured out how to reproduce the magic of an Irish pub, and ship it in a container to anywhere in the world.

On today's show, we get in on the future of investing. We build an automated stock-trading bot. It analyzes the twitter feed of President Donald Trump, then trades stocks with real money. Our money.

The tricks and mind games tax collectors use to get people to pay up.

On today's show: Snuggies, printer toner, and a banking road trip. Three stories about what happens when you actually read the fine print.

Jason Blum makes a lot of movies and makes them cheap. So why are so many turning into blockbusters?

A populist president versus the most powerful banker in America.

One professor had a way to make filing taxes easy and painless. It worked. People loved it. But then a big tax lobby heard about it...

Three short stories about putting a price on something hard to value precisely. We go from $4.66 under a pillow all the way up to $1 trillion across every inch of highway in America

A hundred years ago, nobody talked about "the economy." That's because easy ways to measure and talk about it hadn't been invented. On today's show: how we started boiling nations down to a number.

The Constitution contains a paragraph known as the Emoluments Clause. It's 49 words meant to prevent foreign influence on US officials. How does it apply to a president with a global business empire?

Wikileaks released documents listing the hacks the CIA uses to spy on people. So we revisit our story on hackers for hire: people hunting for flaws in your phone to sell to people, or even the CIA.

President Trump does not like Dodd-Frank, the 2010 law that transformed banking regulation. On today's show, we ask: What are the key parts of the law? And how are they likely to change?