Mary Childs
Mary Childs (she/her) is a co-host and correspondent for NPR's Planet Money podcast. Before joining the team in 2019, she was a senior reporter at Barron's magazine, where she covered the alternatives industry, the bond market and capitalism. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times and Bloomberg News. She's written about the pioneering of new asset classes like time, billionaire's proposals to solve inequality and diversity and discrimination in the finance industry. Before all that, she was also a Watson Fellow, spending a year traveling the world painting portraits. She graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in business journalism and an honors thesis comparing the use and significance of media sting operations in the U.S. and India.
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The White House insists the U.S. economy is not facing a recession, even after gross domestic product contracted for two consecutive quarters. That marker usually indicates a recession.
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Financial markets have been volatile this year, leading some to figure out ways to navigate the risk. A former fund manager says his long-term strategy for success was to avoid winning.
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Investors and companies are swooping in to buy mobile home parks. They raise fees and rents, and evict people who can't pay — using billions of dollars' worth of low interest, government-backed loans. -
LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, is used for choosing interest rates. The system was found to be rigged 10 years ago. Finally, some replacements are being launched.
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Recommendations we get from websites about what to buy are often powered by an algorithm known as collaborative filtering. We trace this technology back to one person trying to declutter his inbox.
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The U.S. government will borrow all of the money used to pay for the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. That kind of borrowing used to set off major alarms with economists. Now? Not so much.
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After climbing more than 1,000%, GameStop's stock price reversed course and dropped suddenly when popular stock trading platforms abruptly halted some trades.
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Hottest Stock On Wall Street: Struggling Video Game Store GameStopLast week shares of video game store GameStop were trading at about $40 a share. Then, a group of Reddit users invested. The move sent stocks soaring and raised several questions.
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A group of amateur stock investors has banded together on Reddit to take on a Wall Street giant in a fight for the value of the stock for GameStop. For now, the little guys are winning.
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Our Planet Money podcast team scans the evidence from behavioral economics for lessons on how to get people to wear masks during the COVID-19 crisis, and to find out why they may not be wearing them.
