Economy

Maybe you got a boring slip of paper in the mail. Maybe you got a spammy-looking email promising you money. Surprise! You're in a class action. If you've done any commerce in the last decade, there's a good chance that someone somewhere was suing on your behalf and you have real money coming your way... if you know what to do.

Class action settlements are on the rise. And, on today's show, we're helping decipher the class action from the perspective of the average class member. How do class actions work? Why are these notices sometimes undecipherable? And, what do you stand to gain (or lose) by responding?

This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Nick Fountain. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

The modern Olympic Games are notorious for saddling host cities with burdensome cost overruns into the billions. Organizers for the Paris 2024 Olympics were aware of this and planned to put on one of the most cost-effective Olympics in recent memory. They still went over budget.

Today on the show, why the Olympics almost always costs host cities much more than they anticipate and what we can learn from the Olympic Games' original economic sin.

Related episodes:
Peacock, potassium and other Paris Olympics Indicators (Apple / Spotify)
Why California's high speed rail was always going to blow out (Apple / Spotify)

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

Longtime NPR correspondent Ina Jaffe has died. She was 75 years old, and had been living with cancer for the past few years.

Many people get range anxiety thinking about taking a long car trip in an EV. But a lot of money has gone into improving roadside chargers. We tried them out for ourselves during a 1,000-mile drive.

The Fed kept interest rates unchanged at the highest in more than two decades. Investors are betting it will start to lower rates at its next meeting in September.

The Federal Reserve has once again opted to leave interest rates unchanged. That appears to be creating a big challenge to one part of the economy: housing prices. Today, we look at how elevated interest rates may actually be keeping home prices and rent high. Plus, we see how one community is taking the issue of housing affordability into its own hands.

Read the research paper co-authored by Julia Fonseca, Lu Liu, and Pierre Mabille.

Related episodes:
When mortgage rates are too low to give up (Apple / Spotify)
The housing shakeup (Apple / Spotify)
The highs and lows of US rent (Apple / Spotify)

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School.

Planet Money Summer School has arrived at the birth of the United States and the chance to set up a whole new economy from scratch. Should there be a centralized bank? Should there be a single currency? We'll travel to two moments in the country's early history when the founders said "nope" to these questions and see what happened.

First we'll witness one of the great economic battles in U.S. history – the president of the United States versus the president of the Bank of the United States – and see how the outcome ushered in an age of financial panics. Then we'll drop in on a time before the U.S. dollar existed as we know it, when you could buy things using one of about 8,000 forms of money circulating in the country. We watch as the Civil War leads to the first standard currency. Along the way, we'll learn why the cycle of economic booms and busts persists to today despite efforts to centralize America's economy throughout history.

This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

Subscribe to Planet Money+ for sponsor-free episode listening in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

British police are reviewing allegations that Washington Post CEO Will Lewis obstructed justice when he worked for media mogul Rupert Murdoch in the U.K. 13 years ago.