Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein is an NPR correspondent and co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He is the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.
Goldstein's interest in technology and the changing nature of work has led him to stories on UPS, the Luddites and the history of light. His aversion to paying retail has led him to stories on Costco, Spirit Airlines and index funds.
He also contributed to the Planet Money T-shirt and oil projects, and to an episode of This American Life that asked: What is money? Ira Glass called it "the most stoner question" ever posed on the show.
Before coming to NPR, Goldstein was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine. He has a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford and a master's in journalism from Columbia.
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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 preview of what a world might look like without banks. The lending outfits match potential borrowers and lenders, cutting banks out of the process entirely.
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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.
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Why Inflation Is So LowWith the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the economy the past several years, why has inflation remained so low?
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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. -
Spirit Airlines is one of America's fastest-growing airlines. It's also among the least popular airlines in America. How can one airline be both things at once? -
A Locked Door, A Secret Meeting And The Birth Of The FedThe creation of America's central bank includes a bunch of bankers locked in a private library and a secret trip to a place called Jekyll Island. -
Over the past 50 years, both the way the federal government spends money and what the government spends money on has changed a lot.
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Clothes donated to charity in the U.S. often wind up for sale in African markets. Here's the story of one shirt that started out at a bat mitzvah in Michigan and wound up in a market in Nairobi.
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The book lists the tax that importers have to pay on approximately every single thing in the universe — and raises a key question about the Planet Money T-shirt.
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Three economists won the Nobel for their work on the prices of stocks and other assets. Two of the winners have very different views about bubbles.
