Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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Like people in other countries that have gone through economic turmoil, people in Myanmar want U.S. dollars that look like they just rolled off the presses.
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Instead, say it's from the "Outer Coastal Plain." (It's part of a plan to kick the state's reputation for making cheap wine.)
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The Amish don't drive and don't connect to the electrical grid. Yet a growing number of Amish people are leaving farming for manufacturing. That means they need tools — and power.
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"We should think of doctors the same way we think of shirts," an economist says. "If we can get doctors at a lower cost from elsewhere in the world then we could save enormous amounts of money."
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Unions in China are typically controlled by management and the government. A union run by democratic vote of the workers would be a huge shift.
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Audie Cornish talks to Robert Smith about the latest on the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
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Robert Siegel talks to Robert Smith about the scene in Newton, Conn., after a deadly elementary school shooting.
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For punishments to work, they need to be both swift and meaningful. The HSBC settlement may be neither.
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The aftermath of Superstorm Sandy has complicated voting in the New York City area. Robert Siegel talks with Robert Smith.
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On this Election Day, people in New York are casting their ballots even though many still don't have power — or even homes to return to. Some polling stations are struggling to get reliable power.
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New Yorkers were ready to get back to work on Thursday, but the region's transportation system wasn't ready to handle all of them. At bus and subway stops there were long lines and frustration, while drivers had their own long waits for the city's bridges and tunnels.
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Eliminating the mortgage-interest tax deduction never sounded so good. Watch the first ad from our totally fake, economist-endorsed, presidential candidate.