Before Kalshi and Polymarket there was the Iowa Electronic Markets

Summary

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Planet Money – Before Kalshi and Polymarket there was the Iowa Electronic Markets

Date: June 24, 2026
Source: NPR / Planet Money (with Throughline)
Host: Erica Barris
Special Contributors: Rund Abdelfattah (Throughline), Robert Forsyth, Coleman Strumpf, Paul Rode

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Episode Overview

This episode of Planet Money, in collaboration with NPR's Throughline, explores the fascinating history and evolution of prediction markets—systems where people bet on the outcomes of real-world events, especially elections. Rather than just reviewing the story of recent platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, the show dives deep into a little-known precursor: the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM). Along the way, Planet Money and Throughline examine how prediction markets have shaped (and been shaped by) economics, human psychology, and regulatory boundaries—from their heyday in early 20th-century America to their modern academic origins and digital resurgence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Modern Prediction Markets (Iowa 1988)

• [03:14] - [07:20]
  • Three University of Iowa economics professors, led by Robert Forsyth, conceived the IEM over a "three-beer lunch" in 1988 after national polls failed to predict a key upset in the Democratic primary.
  • Inspiration: “As economists, what would we do if we were going to try to predict the outcome of something? And what’s natural for a bunch of economists? They said, well, let’s run a market.”
    – Robert Forsyth [04:37]
  • They set up a small, online market where students and faculty could trade political 'stocks' (shares in candidates).
  • The first IEM forecast—Bush vs. Dukakis—predicted the popular vote with remarkable accuracy (within 0.2%), outperforming major polls.
  • The IEM operated under a "no action letter" from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), with limits (max $500 stake per participant and no profit motive).

2. The Psychology and Mechanics of Prediction Markets

• [09:58] - [11:44]
  • Coleman Strumpf, a longtime prediction market researcher, ties the concept to horse racing as a formative analog—highlighting the role of human behavior, risk, and the thrill of being "right."
  • Strumpf's early experiences: “It was as interesting as much to me to watch what everybody else was doing...people like to use [markets] as a way of sort of showing off their smarts.”
    – Coleman Strumpf [10:30, 11:15]

3. Early History: Betting on Politics in America—and Beyond

• [13:40] - [17:12]
  • Economic historian Paul Rode uncovers that election betting long predates the IEM, going back to at least the 16th century (papal elections, city-state politics) and flourishing in America since the founding.
  • In late 19th to early 20th-century America, election 'curb markets' operated openly outside the NYSE, involving the political and business elite.
  • Quirky traditions: bets sometimes involved non-monetary stakes like cutting beards, eating crow, or pushing a wheelbarrow down Main Street.
  • Quote: “If the candidate I support doesn't win, I'm gonna cut my beard or I'm gonna walk from New York to Boston.”
    – Coleman Strumpf [14:17]
  • These curb markets became so prominent that newspapers (Wall Street Journal, NYT) covered them like sports—publicly displaying political allegiances and risk.
  • “They were always right. Basically they would tell us who would win.”
    – Coleman Strumpf [16:47]

4. Decline: Why Did the Old Prediction Markets Disappear?

• [19:04] - [20:37]
  • The “golden age” of such markets lasted until the 1940s, after which they abruptly vanished.
  • Key factors in the decline:
    • The emergence of “scientific” polling (Gallup et al)—news organizations preferred reporting on polls rather than wagers.
    • A distraction: the growth of horse racing offered more frequent betting opportunities than the occasional election.
    • Legal ambiguities and evolving public attitudes.
  • Strumpf: “The problem with elections...is we don't have enough of them. This is around the time when thoroughbred racing started to really take off...And I think some of the interest among traders kind of dissipated at that time.”
    – Coleman Strumpf [19:17-19:40]

5. The Academic (and Regulated) Revival

• [21:18] - [22:59]
  • IEM reintroduced prediction markets as a research endeavor in 1988, sparking renewed interest among scholars and the public.
  • Robert Forsyth describes how IEM’s $500 cap stymied interest from major speculators but served as a model for studying hedging and risk in policy.
  • Forsyth on regulatory ‘crossroads’: “We would occasionally get a phone call saying ... ‘Why don’t you come with us to the Cayman Islands and you can run without restriction.’ And maybe we should have done that. I don’t know.”
    – Robert Forsyth [22:00-22:29]
  • “There are days that I'm sort of jealous of Kalshi and Poly Market. I mean, they've really taken the same idea...and expanded it vastly until you can just about trade on anything there.”
    – Robert Forsyth [22:33]

6. Broader Implications and Legacy

• [22:59] - [23:46]
  • IEM proved that markets could aggregate information and produce predictive insight. This prompted a wave of experimentation—could markets predict more than just elections?
  • “Once we see, oh look, these markets kind of work in the modern period, could we use these markets to forecast other things?”
    – Coleman Strumpf [23:13]
  • Modern platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket inherit IEM’s spirit, using similar principles but operating on a larger, sometimes less-regulated canvas.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “It was the day after the Michigan caucus, which, as you may recall, Jesse Jackson won. And that was a big surprise. The polls missed it altogether.”
  – Robert Forsyth [04:02, 04:19]

• “Lo and behold, at midnight the night before Election Day, we ended up predicting the outcome of the popular vote within 2/10 of 1%.”
  – Robert Forsyth [05:30]

• “It was just so different, right? I mean, who had ever made a market on an election?”
  – Robert Forsyth [07:46]

• “There’s betting on who would become the Pope, elections in city states in Venice and Genoa…”
  – Paul Rode [13:51]

• “If you were like the head of the Republican Party...you’d be expected to go to the betting commissioner and be willing to offer money for your candidates.”
  – Paul Rode [15:19]

• “...they were always right. Basically they would tell us who would win.”
  – Coleman Strumpf [16:47]

• “I have never found one person who could have been around during that period, or even books that talk about elections during that period that mention these markets. ...but they seemingly did [disappear].”
  – Coleman Strumpf [20:37]

• “You have to stay small ... If you stay in the United States, why don't you come with us and come over to the Cayman Islands and you operate there and you can run without restriction. And maybe we should have done that.”
  – Robert Forsyth [22:00]

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Timestamps to Important Segments

| Timestamp | Description | |---------------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:14 | The Iowa professors' origin story for the IEM | | 04:37 | “Let’s run a market on it”—economist logic | | 05:30 | IEM’s first election prediction: almost perfect accuracy | | 06:00 | Navigating US regulations (CFTC, no-action letter) | | 07:46 | National media catches on, “first of its kind?” | | 09:58 | Prediction markets at the racetrack—behavioral roots | | 13:40 | Early 20th-century American election markets | | 16:47 | Market accuracy in historical election betting | | 19:04 | The decline: rise of polling and horse racing | | 21:18, 22:33 | Modern revival, IEM influence on today’s platforms | | 23:13 | Expanding beyond elections: the vision for prediction mkts |

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Tone and Style

The conversation is lively, intellectually curious, and at times self-deprecating—true to Planet Money's accessible, human-centered approach to economic storytelling, blended with Throughline’s appetite for rich, surprising history.

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Conclusion

This episode enriches our understanding of prediction markets—moving beyond the myth of modern innovation by revealing the centuries-old, ever-evolving interplay between risk, economics, and human nature. The Iowa Electronic Markets represent not just an academic milestone, but a bridge between ancient street bets and our digital, data-driven age. As new platforms emerge, the ghosts of the racetrack and the curb market live on.

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To dive deeper: Listen to the full Throughline episode on the history and future of prediction markets (including terrorism futures, military applications, and more), linked in the Planet Money show notes.

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Transcript

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[Erica Barris]

Hey guys, we have an episode for you. We always do. But first we have a question.

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

A lot has happened in the past five or so years and we want to know how, how you all are holding up. Did you make any big decisions that are maybe backfiring now? Like, did you move to Montana during the pandemic and now your work wants you back in the office in Seattle? What's your plan?

[Erica Barris]

Or is your money in the stock market right now and you are just like watching it grow, grow, grow, grow? What are you spending it on?

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

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[Erica Barris]

a lot more these days?

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

Groceries, going on dates, doing something fun for your family? Have you found any great life hacks to help you get by or maybe even thrive in this economy?

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. We want to hear from you and maybe we'll call you up for a future show about how things feel right now. Send us an email about how the economy is affecting you and your [e-mail] and maybe we'll call you up to

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

chat that email planetmoneypr.org all right, Erica, you have a show to start.

[Erica Barris]

This is Planet MONEY from npr. Recently I heard a story that changed how I think about prediction markets. One moment in the story in particular, it was part of the history of where prediction markets came from, which, as you may have heard, goes back hundreds of years in some form, but also in another form, prediction markets as we know them today were cooked up by economists trying to test some theories on markets. And in this story of the evolution of prediction markets, there's a moment when an economic historian studying the long ago early roots of prediction markets realizes there's already a well functioning design of a prediction market at the racetrack. Now, of course, many of you will say, yeah, obviously gambling is gambling, of course. But the part I didn't quite know is that prediction markets for elections were popular and robust until they mysteriously faded away. And one theory is horse racing took over, you know, because instead of an election every year or whatever, you can have a dozen races a week. This all comes from this fascinating history of the economic origins of prediction markets. The economists who cooked up the proto prediction markets, the political machines that basically had to financially bet on their candidates hundreds of years ago and even farther back than that. So today we're going to share an excerpt of this story for you. It comes from our friends at Throughline, NPR's excellent history podcast. They take one big question every episode and bring you the history and context behind it. Beautifully sound designed and deeply researched. Today we pass it off to host Rund Abdel Futtah and Throughline for a History of Prediction Markets.

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

Part one.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Three professors walk into a bar on a spring afternoon in 1988. Robert Forsyth and two of his colleagues were sitting around a table at a local sports bar called the Airliner in downtown Iowa City. And like they often did, the three economics professors got to talking about the news.

[Robert Forsyth]

And I would say the conversation was helped because it was a three beer lunch, which led to this creativity.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I think some days three beers each or each of each beer. Okay. It was an election year. After Super Tuesday, Michael Dukakis was the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. That is, until a huge surprise upset.

[Coleman Strumpf]

The polls had predicted a Dukakis victory, but it didn't happen.

[Robert Forsyth]

It was the day after the Michigan caucus, which, as you may recall, Jesse Jackson won.

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

Jesse Jackson, he scored a stunning win yesterday in Michigan's Democratic caucuses, defeating Michael Dukakis by a margin of nearly 2 to 1 in the popular vote.

[Robert Forsyth]

And that was a big surprise. The polls missed it altogether.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Going in, political polls had shown Jackson and Dukakis running neck and neck. But what happened was a blowout. Jackson won the Michigan caucus with 53% of the vote and Dukakis only got 29%.

[Robert Forsyth]

And that's where it came from. We said, well, gee, you know, as economists, what would we do if we were going to try to predict the outcome of something? And what's natural for a bunch of economists? They said, well, let's run a market

[Rund Abdelfattah]

on it like a stock or commodities market. So Robert and his colleagues got together a couple hundred people, students and faculty at the University of Iowa. They set up an online interface where those people could buy stock in political candidates. And just like on Wall street, these political stocks could be traded. So for example, when George H.W. bush and Michael Dukakis ultimately went up against each other in the general election, if you didn't like Dukakis chances, you could sell your shares in him. The overarching idea here, the market might show what people were actually thinking even better than polls could. The wisdom of the crowd.

[Robert Forsyth]

And lo and behold, at midnight the night before Election Day, we ended up predicting the outcome of the popular vote within 2/10 of 1%.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That result outperformed Major polls, including Gallup Harris and CBS New York Times. It was so effective that Robert and his colleagues thought we'd like to do this again next election, this time with a bigger sample size.

[Robert Forsyth]

So we went to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and asked them whether they would give us permission to operate nationwide.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And just so I understand, what was the law that you needed to get around?

[Robert Forsyth]

Well, anytime you have people exchanging real money on the outcome of something, the question is, is this gambling or not? And even though there's some form of regulation that's going to oversee you back

[Rund Abdelfattah]

then and now, the body that oversees that regulation in the US is called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the cftc. It's been in charge of commodity futures, like markets that set the future price of grain since the 1970s.

[Robert Forsyth]

They've issued us what they called a no action letter.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That letter was basically like a permission slip. As long as the Iowa electronic markets followed a few set rules, the CFTC would allow it to do its thing.

[Robert Forsyth]

And the rules were we stayed small, we couldn't accept the cons over $500, and we didn't engage in paid advertising.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So they could only run markets on presidential elections. Sports were off the table and the Iowa electronic markets did not make a profit. Between 1988 and 2004, the Iowa Electronic markets grew from a one off experiment to one of the most reliable predictors of American presidential elections. During that period, its predictions beat traditional polls 74% of the time. And as the market continued to grow, so did the public's interest in it.

[Bob Edwards]

I'm Bob Edwards and this is NPR's Morning Edition. If you think you know who the next President of the United States will be, there's a place in Iowa where you can back up your convictions with a buck or two.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

At what point did you realize that people outside of the University of Iowa, outside of your orbit, were starting to pay attention to what you all were doing?

[Robert Forsyth]

Well, we started to get a lot of national publicity. This was different enough that before we knew it, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times of London and npr, NPR and a lot of the television media started picking us up because it was just so different, right? I mean, who had ever made a market on an election?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Oh, so they thought this was the first time something like this was happening?

[Robert Forsyth]

That's right. That's right.

[Erica Barris]

It was, of course, not the first election betting market. Not by a mile. After the break, we go back farther and meet an economic historian trying to find the origins of election betting. More throughline. After the Break.

[Evan Kahnweiser]

Foreign.

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[Erica Barris]

Okay, let's call this Part two, the Racetrack. We pick it up with Run from Throughline and Coleman Strumpf.

[Coleman Strumpf]

I am a economics professor at Wake Forest University. I've been teaching a course on prediction markets for almost 20 years.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Coleman may be an economist, but his driving interest is in human behavior on top of prediction markets. He's written papers about illegal file sharing, tax evasion, and the economics of addiction. And he says if you want to understand where prediction markets came from, just head down to your local horse track.

[Robert Forsyth]

They're under starters orders and they're on.

[Coleman Strumpf]

My uncle used to take me to the racetrack and had me been on horses. I guess I was already a social scientist in training at 10 years old. Because first of all, yes, back many, many years ago you could be 10 years old and go to a racetrack in bed and nobody like I couldn't even reach up to the counter and nobody seemed to care very much. But it was as interesting as much to me to watch what everybody else was doing. And a lot of things that I see when I look at markets today I could sort of first see then

[Rund Abdelfattah]

watching people read the odds and make bets taught Coleman something essential about gambling. Winning makes people feel good and the longer the odds, the better the winners feel.

[Coleman Strumpf]

I remember when I was younger and I was watching people do it, if somebody would bet on a long shot horse and that horse would actually win, the person would not only win a lot of money, but they were going around to all their friends saying how smart they were because they managed to figure out this very, very unlikely thing from happening. And I sort of realized that's part of the sort of psychology of these markets is people like to be smart. People like to use this as a way of sort of showing off their smarts of how they figured these things out.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I should say here there's been a lot of back and forth over the years about whether or not prediction markets are really just betting dressed up as something fancier, or if you're looking at legal definitions, whether they might count as gambling. We're not here to litigate that. Coleman's point is as long as people have been putting money on things, whether it's on the stock market, in insurance, or at the racetrack, social scientists and economists have been able to learn something about us from those bets. So flash forward to the 2000 presidential election. George W. Bush versus Al Gore, one of the closest presidential races in a century. Coleman was doing research about election forecasting at the University of North Carolina, and he was keeping a close eye on the Iowa electronic market.

[Coleman Strumpf]

I was writing a paper about the Iowa electronic market when my then colleague was at the University of North Carolina at the time. Paul Rode came by my office, asked me what I was doing, and I said, I'm looking at the first political prediction market we have. And Paul, who is an economic historian, said, nope, that's totally not correct.

[Paul Roede]

He was MIT and I'm Stanford. And a lot of times creative frictions happen from people with different perspectives.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's Paul Roede. He's an economic historian at the University of Michigan. But back in the early 2000s, he worked down the hall from Coleman at the University of North Carolina.

[Paul Roede]

I happen to be reading some microfilm at the library and came across news stories in October, November 1924 about election markets. So I go up to Coleman Strump to his office and say, hey, did you know these happened? And he wasn't aware that they happened. So it was an interesting surprise for both of us.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Paul and Coleman started digging into the archives in earnest. And it turns out pretty much as long as there have been elections, people have been betting on them back to the 16th century.

[Paul Roede]

There's betting on who would become the

[Coleman Strumpf]

Pope, elections in city states, in Venice

[Rund Abdelfattah]

and Genoa, and in the US you

[Coleman Strumpf]

can, like, find markets going back to

[Paul Roede]

George Washington, how long the Stamp act would be in place before the American Revolution.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Paul and Coleman say for centuries that these markets stayed relatively small. There wasn't a ton of money on the line. Sometimes the bets didn't involve money at all.

[Coleman Strumpf]

If the candidate I support doesn't win, I'm gonna cut my beard or I'm gonna walk from New York to Boston,

[Paul Roede]

or you have to eat a crow. If I'm right, you have to push me in a wheelbarrow down Main Street.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But around the turn of the 20th century, election markets in the United States really started to gain steam.

[Coleman Strumpf]

The main place that people would trade on elections called the curb Exchange, which literally, as the name suggests, was the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange.

[Paul Roede]

They'd be sitting on the curb and they'd be trading stocks and signaling the people in the offices above them.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Stocks to be clear in political candidates. People running for office.

[Coleman Strumpf]

Reporters for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times could go down to this pit and not only tell us what the overall price was, but the names of the people trading. And if you look, the people who were trading, these were like the elite of the city. These were people from Tammany Hall. These were bankers, Wall street folks. People owned hotels.

[Paul Roede]

People would be doing this very publicly. So if you were like the head of the Republican Party or you're the head of the New York Tammany hall, you'd be expected to go to the betting commissioner and be willing to offer money for your candidates.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Wow.

[Paul Roede]

So it would be part of the publicity about you're standing behind this person. You think they have a good shot of winning.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Were you expected to bet on your own candidate, or could you bet against your candidate if you thought your candidate wasn't going to win?

[Paul Roede]

So we knew that, like William Jennings Bryant, the populist from Nebraska was not popular with the workers in New York. The Democratic machine in New York has to light bet for him. But then the stories are behind the scenes. They're placing bets the other way so

[Rund Abdelfattah]

that they cancel out because they don't want to lose money. Like, publicly. They'll say, we love him, we endorse him, but they don't want to lose their money in the market.

[Paul Roede]

Yeah. So they're going to be like, hedging or going against their candidate.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

All of this was happening in a sort of legal gray area. Making a friendly bet on the outcome of an election wasn't against the law, but if he did that, you weren't supposed to vote.

[Paul Roede]

But I don't think anybody ever said, we're turning away from the polls because we know that you bet on elections.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Were these prediction markets, from as far as you can tell, good at predicting the outcomes of elections and whatever else was being bet on?

[Coleman Strumpf]

So this was like the second thing that I was wrong about. My sense was okay, the markets will do as well as they can, but there's not much information to be had. These markets won't really tell us anything. Well, that I was definitely wrong on. They were always right. Basically they would tell us who would win. They could give you a sense of whether there'd be a landslide. It was really pretty remarkable.

[Erica Barris]

By the 1980s, the IO electronics market would put that theory into practice. But why did it take them so long? That's after the break.

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[Erica Barris]

and now Part three the Other Golden Age of Prediction Markets Back to run from Throughline with economist Colman Strumpf.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

You kind of pointed out that late 19th century to World War II era as this kind of golden age almost of prediction markets. Why did they fall off after that?

[Coleman Strumpf]

For a while it's a combination of factors. One of the things that both drove the popularity of the markets as well as the discussion of the markets was the press coverage. Through this period, all the newspapers covered it, but they were never very comfortable doing this. Then in the 1930s, that's when the scientific polls, Gallup and some other folks came around. And so the polls were doing something that was kind of the same thing. And newspapers were much more comfortable writing about polls than they were with markets. The other thing in some sense has to do with interest of the people trading. So if you're somebody who really likes this, for whatever reason, you like to be known as a good forecaster, you like to make money, you like the adrenaline rush. Any of these factors. The problem with elections, or at least I'll just say US Elections, is we don't have enough of them. This is around the time when thoroughbred racing started to really take off. And so instead of a couple events a year, you could have 12 races a night. And I think for people who were interested in that, I think the horse track was more attractive as a thing to do. And I think some of the interest among traders kind of dissipated at that time.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

As far as Coleman and Paul can tell, presidential election markets went dark sometime in the 1940s, and then for the next four decades, radio silence.

[Coleman Strumpf]

I have never found one person who could have been around during that period, or even books that talk about elections during that period that mention these markets. This was not some small, tiny thing. I don't know how they've managed to slip through the cracks of what's known about that time, but they seemingly did

[Rund Abdelfattah]

until 1988, when three professors in Iowa went for a three beer lunch. And the Iowa Electronic Markets catapulted prediction markets back into the public consciousness as an alternative to political polls. Here's Robert Forsyth again, one of the founders of the Iowa Electronic Markets.

[Robert Forsyth]

Once we went nationally, two things happened. We would get phone calls from traders around the country, not realizing we had a $500 limit and wanting to send us a check for several hundred thousand dollars to invest in the market. And we'd have to say, well, gee, that'd be great, but we only can take $500 of your money. But we've got to realize that many of these people weren't speculators. These were people that were involved and were trying to hedge some political risk that would affect their company or their operations.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Say you're worried a certain candidate might win and pass laws that will hurt your business. You can hedge your bets, put some money on the person you do not want to win. If they win, you cover your losses.

[Robert Forsyth]

So that was one kind of phone call. And then we would occasionally get a phone call saying, this is great, but you know, you have to stay small. If you stay in the United States, why don't you come with us and come over to the Cayman Islands and you operate there and you can run without restriction. And maybe we should have done that. I don't know, at the point in time, we were a bunch of academics who were mainly concerned with our teaching and our research. And so we turn those opportunities down.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Looking back on it now, why do you say, well, maybe we should have done that?

[Robert Forsyth]

Well, you know, there are days that I'm sort of jealous of Kalshi and Poly Market. I mean, they've really taken the same idea. They're running basically the same prediction markets we did, but on a much bigger scale. In fact, they basically use the same rules for trading and issuing contracts that we used back in 1988. But they certainly have expanded it vastly until you can just about trade on anything there.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Iowa Electronic Market established something important. It demonstrated to modern economists that prediction markets worked and that sparked a chain reaction, says economist Coleman Strumpf.

[Coleman Strumpf]

Once we see, oh, look, these markets kind of work in the modern period, could we use these markets to forecast other things? So could we look at other elections? Could we look at current events? And I think it kind of showed to the world that these things could work, but maybe it was only in this one specific domain and we didn't yet know would that same kind of forecasting savvy translate into other situations. So that was for other markets to help point out.

[Erica Barris]

That was economist Coleman Strumpf speaking with Rund Abdelfattah and Throughline, NPR's history podcast. Each episode they take today's big questions and find the context in history. Deeply researched stories, beautifully sound designed. This is just a part of their episode on prediction markets. They have much more on terrorism, future markets and military applications. Check it out in their podcast feedback. We will put a link in our show notes. Thanks as always to our NPR supporters. Reminder that we have a live virtual book tour event for you this Thursday, June 25th at 3pm Eastern. Check out the start of our most recent bonus episode for details on joining. We're hoping to do more virtual events like this and if you aren't a supporter and want to become one, yes, please go to plus.NPR.org this episode was produced for Planet Money by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and edited by Alex Goldmark. I'm Erica Barris and I'll let Throughline and Rund give you the credits in their classic Throughline style.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Adablouei. This episode was produced by me and

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

Sarah Wyman, Julia Redpath, Casey Minor, Christina

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Kim, Devin Kadayama, Kiana Mojaven, Irene Noguchi, Julie Cain. Thank you to David Vieri, Brett Neely, Johannes Durgi, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Yolanda Sangweni and Tommy Evans. And shout out to Michael Strumpf. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which

[Co-host or Producer (possibly Sarah Wyman or Julia Redpath)]

includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Erica Barris]

This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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