Adam Davidson

Credit Jay Paul

Adam Davidson is co-founder and co-host of Planet Money, a co-production of NPR and This American Life. He also writes the weekly "It's the Economy" column for the New York Times Magazine.

His work has won several major awards including the Peabody, DuPont-Columbia, and the Polk. His radio documentary on the housing crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," which he co-reported and produced with Alex Blumberg, was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by the Arthur L. Carter of Journalism Institute at New York University. It was widely recognized as the clearest and most entertaining explanation of the roots of the financial crisis in any media.

Davidson and Blumberg took the lessons they learned crafting "The Giant Pool of Money" to create Planet Money. In two weekly podcasts, a blog, and regular features on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and This American Life, Planet Money helps listeners understand how dramatic economic change is impacting their lives. Planet Money also proves, every day, that substantive, intelligent economic reporting can be funny, engaging, and accessible to the non-expert.

Before Planet Money, Davidson was International Business and Economics Correspondent for NPR. He traveled around the world to cover the global economy and pitched in during crises, such as reporting from Indonesia's Banda Aceh just after the tsunami, New Orleans post-Katrina, and Paris during the youth riots.

Prior to coming to NPR, Davidson was Middle East correspondent for PRI's Marketplace. He spent a year in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003 to 2004, producing award-winning reports on corruption in the US occupation.

Davidson has also written for The Atlantic, Harper's, GQ, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines. He has a degree in the history of religion from the University of Chicago.

4:56pm

Tue May 14, 2013
Business

U.S. Battling Other Countries To Be Cheapest Source Of Goods

Originally published on Tue May 14, 2013 7:15 pm

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish.

There is a global race on, an odd one. Countries are competing to be the cheapest source of goods. We're not talking about low-wage countries, like China or Bangladesh. No. This is a battle between Japan and Germany and the United States. And today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed the latest scores in this race.

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4:30pm

Wed March 6, 2013
Business

Dow's 'Record Highs' Misleading Without Including Inflation

Originally published on Thu March 7, 2013 11:49 am

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News . I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish.

And a record close. That's what we've been hearing both today and yesterday as the Dow Jones industrial average climbs upwards.

BLOCK: That may be an ear-grabbing headline after a recession and years of unimpressive growth. But we begin this hour with a different take from Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money. Hey, Adam.

ADAM DAVIDSON, BYLINE: Hey, Melissa.

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4:56pm

Thu November 15, 2012
Politics

Raising Revenues Or Taxes — What's The Difference?

Originally published on Fri November 16, 2012 11:55 am

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

We're going to dig into some of those policy differences now between Republicans and Democrats. When it comes to reducing the deficit, both sides insist it's time for compromise. But President Obama says tax cuts for the richest Americans must end.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to the top two percent, what I'm not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don't need it.

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3:23am

Fri September 7, 2012
Planet Money

This Man Makes Beautiful Suits, But He Can't Afford To Buy One

Originally published on Fri September 7, 2012 10:15 am

Credit Marvin Orellana / The New York Times

Peter Frew is one of a tiny number of people left in the United States who can — entirely on his own, using almost no machinery — make a classic bespoke suit. He can measure you, draw a pattern, cut the fabric and then hand-stitch a suit designed to fit your body perfectly.

Frew spent more than a decade as an apprentice for a remarkable tailor in his native Jamaica. He now sells his suits for about $4,000. Since New York is filled with very rich people who see their suits as an essential uniform, Frew has all the orders he can handle.

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6:17pm

Mon July 2, 2012
Planet Money

Scandal That Cost Barclays Chairman His Job Threatens To Spread

Originally published on Tue July 3, 2012 12:24 pm

Credit Oli Scarff / Getty Images

Every day at 11 a.m., a few big banks tell the British Bankers' Association what it costs them to borrow. Out of that comes LIBOR — the London Interbank Offered Rate, a dull but vital interest rate that underpins trillions of dollars of transactions globally, from home mortgages and personal credit cards to major corporate lending.

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3:16am

Tue April 10, 2012
Planet Money

Why Matzo Makers Love Regulation

Credit Mike Derer / AP

For more, see our video, Inside The Matzo Factory, and see Adam Davdson's latest NYT Magazine column

The matzo business may be the most heavily regulated business in the world.

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1:06pm

Fri March 16, 2012
Planet Money

Why Are Some Countries Rich And Others Poor?

Originally published on Mon March 19, 2012 5:37 pm

Why are some nations rich and others poor? In a new book called Why Nations Fail, a pair of economists argue that a lot comes down to politics.

To research the book, the authors scoured the world for populations and geographic areas that are identical in all respects save one: they're on different sides of a border.

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12:01am

Thu February 9, 2012
Planet Money

What Do The Dow's Daily Swings Mean? Not Much.

Originally published on Thu February 9, 2012 5:22 pm

Credit Mario Tama / Getty Images

Turn on the news on any given day, and you're likely to hear about the Dow Jones industrial average. It is the most frequently checked, and cited, proxy of U.S. economic health. But a lot of people — maybe most — don't even know what it is. It's just the stock prices of 30 big companies, summed up and roughly averaged. That's it.

And what does the daily movement of this number have to do with the lives of most Americans? Not much.

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12:01am

Fri January 13, 2012
Planet Money

The Transformation Of American Factory Jobs, In One Company

This is the second in a two-part series. Part one is here. For more, see Adam Davidson's cover story in this month's issue of The Atlantic.

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12:01am

Thu January 12, 2012
Planet Money

The History Of Factory Jobs In America, In One Town

Credit scmikeburton / Flickr

For more, see Adam Davidson's cover story in this month's issue of The Atlantic.

Greenville County, South Carolina is where manufacturing's past and future live side by side. This is not a metaphor; it's a visible fact. In South Carolina, and throughout America, factories produce more than ever. Yet in Greenville, there are abandoned textile mills everywhere you look.

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