Check This Out: NPR’s “Planet Money” studies the gold standard

<a href="http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510289
“>National Public Radio’s “Planet Money” podcast, recommended by Snohomish County Business Journal editor Kurt Batdorf

The staff of “Planet Money” takes complex theories and esoteric financial news that often confounds me and turns it into entertaining and informative stories. They live up to their iTunes motto: “The Economy, Explained.”

“Planet Money” traces its start on Chicago Public Media’s “This American Life” in an episode that explored how sub-prime mortgages created the toxic assets that brought the country to the brink of economic disaster in 2008.

Story topics vary widely. You might hear a “deep read” interview with an author one week and exploration of Haitian rice imports the next.

This week, check out a two-part exploration of the gold standard. Episode 252 looks at the U.S. economy when it followed the gold standard through 1971. Episode 253 looks at why most modern economists think the gold standard exacerbated the Great Depression and how President Franklin D. Roosevelt temporarily lifted the standard in 1933 in a bid to stabilize the sinking economy.