Do trade deficits matter?

In the early 90’s, a company called General Magic began working on a portable device that would allow people to check email, make phone calls, even play games. It was basically a smartphone. But it never caught on.On today’s show, a theory about why this device failed. General Ma ...  Show more

Prediction markets aren’t new. Election betting was common until the 1940s, then mysteriously faded away.There was an entire political era when party bosses were expected to conspicuously gamble on their candidates (even if they secretly hedged).And in the 1980s, a few economists ...  Show more

At a time of enormous economic upheaval and uncertainty prompted by President Trump’s trade war, we asked our listeners what they wanted to understand about this financial moment.

Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, tries to answer so ...

President Trump announced a blanket tariff on all imports to the U.S., and additional, specific tariffs on dozens of countries. How will this change in trade policy impact consumers? This episode: White House correspondents Deepa Shivaram and Danielle Kurtzleben, and senior White ...  Show more

President Donald Trump thinks that Asia's goods exports are automatically America's loss and as part of his ‘reciprocal’ tariff policy, he has imposed some of the highest import taxes on goods from south-east Asia. So what does this mean for the region? And are Trump's policies p ...  Show more

The tit-for-tat tariff escalations between the US and China are on pause, at least temporarily. But if the world’s two biggest economies don’t make progress by July, they could return with a vengeance. How can the two parties make progress? And what does China actually want from ...  Show more