Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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NPR's Planet Money team follows the oil they bought on the final part of its journey — into someone's gas tank.
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In The Oil Business, Why Timing Is EverythingNPR's "Planet Money" team embarked on a quest to buy, transport and refine crude oil. The team learns that you have to be as savvy as possible because oil prices go up — and down.
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After buying 100 barrels of crude oil and delivering it to a pipeline, NPR's Planet Money team goes to a refinery to see it turned into gasoline.
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'Planet Money' Team Heads To Kansas To Get Into The Oil BusinessNPR's Planet Money team embarks on a quest to buy, transport and refine crude oil. We'll meet all the people who make our gasoline possible.
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The simple answer is a lack of money: no money to expand their fields or use the latest seeds and technology. But economists have a more complicated theory. Perhaps, farmers face too much risk.
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One of the perks of being in the European Union is easy travel. Flights are cheap and there are no border checks between most of the countries.
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What happens when a country decides to sell its water then hits a drought? Our Planet Money team takes us to a country in Africa that might have given away its most valuable resource.
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Shoemaker New Balance is criticizing the Obama administration over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The company is trying to make a running shoe with 100 percent American parts and feel the trade deal will doom shoes made in the U.S.
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Puerto Rico Credit Union Builds Confidence With A New HeadquartersAs Puerto Rico faces a debt crisis, the island's banking institutions are trying to keep their customers calm. One great trick: making your building look solid.
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Argentina is paying up. After a lengthy legal battle that could change how countries borrow money, Argentina has come to a settlement with its most stalwart creditors.