Darian Woods
Darian Woods is a reporter and producer for The Indicator from Planet Money. He blends economics, journalism, and an ear for audio to tell stories that explain the global economy. He's reported on the time the world got together and solved a climate crisis, vaccine intellectual property explained through cake baking, and how Kit Kat bars reveal hidden economic forces.
Before NPR, Woods worked as an adviser to the Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury. He has an honors degree in economics from the University of Canterbury and a Master of Public Policy from UC Berkeley.
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A corporate finance professor explains how Boeing's troubles stem from the company's fateful shift away from engineering to financial engineering decades ago.
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Sheila Bair was a top banking regulator during the financial crisis. Now, she writes kids books about how to avoid the scammers and predatory lenders she encountered in her former work.
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America grows so many apples that the government ends up buying large amounts because there's not enough demand from consumers and processors. The imbalance is driving some producers out of business.
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Unanswered messages. Endless swiping. An opaque algorithm. The online dating backlash feels like it's reached a fever pitch. Hinge's CEO is trying to do something about it.
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Romance is one of the few profitable genres in the self-publishing industry. How romance writers turned e-books into a publishing juggernaut.
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The Maldives is a small island nation struggling with a heavy debt load. Its borrowing includes $500 million worth of something called sukuk. These are bond-like investments that don't pay interest, to be in line with Islamic law. Today on the show, we explain how sukuk works, how it fits into the larger world of Islamic finance and what might happen if the Maldives can't pay back its debt. 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.
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Two years ago, the yield curve inverted, meaning short-term interest rates on treasury bonds were unusually higher than long term rates. When that's happened in the past, a recession has come.
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In September, 254,000 jobs were added to the US economy and the unemployment rate ticked down very slightly to 4.1%. It's unexpectedly strong, and relieving news for workers after a pretty lackluster summer. But, given how the labor market cooled over summer, is the labor market still on thin ice? And if there were to be a plummet in jobs, could anything be done to speed up the recovery?
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As a record number of people retire, social security won’t be around for much longer either. We look at the origins of social security and some new ideas to tackle new retirement challenges.
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Darnell Epps is a Yale trained lawyer who is bent on solving a non-legal problem: a shortage in manufacturing workers. He enrolled at vocational school to get a better idea of the job market.