Hey, we broke a story. A big one. Planet Money readers and listeners read and heard last Friday (and on This American Life over the weekend) that the bailout bill allows the Treasury Department not only to buy toxic assets but to also take ownership of US banks. Time Magazine is taking credit for breaking that story--which they didn't get to until yesterday. After Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson publicly admitted it. The New York Times ...

With the aim of improving infection control in hospitals, the nation’s top epidemiological societies issued guidelines to help lower infection rates.

Wallets snapped shut in the last month as consumers faced a plunging stock market and home prices.

Pending home sales rose 7.4 percent from July to August, the National Association of Realtors said. It was a surprising piece of positive news for the battered housing market.

Georgetown University's legal and finance scholar Emma Coleman Jordan, and Bill Moyers look at the noise machine, which seems to be operating at full tilt:BILL MOYERS: There've been a lot of voices on cable channels recently blaming this bubble, this crisis, the cause of all of this catastrophe we're in right now, on poor people who took out mortgages that they couldn't afford to buy home they wanted. They shouldn't have. Watch these clippings and ...

Witnessing Congress vote to enact a landmark piece of financial legislation this week that a majority of politicians in both parties, the American public, and nearly all economists despise has been a passing strange affair. We have been asked to trust the very people who were responsible for creating a worldwide market debacle to fix it. We have seen uber-liberal Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and President George Bush on the same side. We have seen ...