[1] The podcast was created by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson after the success of "The Giant Pool of Money," an episode they recorded for This American Life.

[2] Planet Money was launched on September 6, 2008, to cover the financial crisis of 2007–08 in the wake of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Intimate stories are used as a leading thread and use commonplace language with entertaining plots to describe abstract or complex economic and political issues.

This method translates political or economic topics, once historically dependent on academic language and higher education, to stories that engage the general public.

Planet Money was the first to report the small print in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that allowed deviation from the original Paulson plan.

[7] Senator Max Baucus praised the show's attempts to explain the financial crisis "in terms the average American starts to understand".

[19] The design for the shirt was a squirrel holding a martini glass, which was meant to reference the economist John Maynard Keynes' phrase for the human elements in economics, the "animal spirits.