Greg Rosalsky

Greg Rosalsky is an economics journalist at Planet Money who uses housing markets, policy experiments, and offbeat data stories to show how the design of the economy shapes everyday life. Since 2018, he has been a writer and reporter at Planet Money, and he also writes the Planet Money newsletter and appears as a host on the Planet Money podcast. His background includes more than five years producing and reporting economics stories at a major economics podcast, which carries over into his current work in the form of tightly structured, research-driven narratives.

Housing programs, rent control, and falling home prices

Rosalsky’s distinct angle on real estate is to treat housing as an economic system shaped by incentives, regulation, and long-term policy rather than as a simple market of buyers and sellers. In his coverage of a federal housing program from the 1990s, he follows new research on its long-term effects, profiling a Harvard economist and a research team to show which neighborhoods benefited and which did not, and what that says about how housing subsidies can reshape local economies for decades. He brings similar rigor to stories on affordable housing and rent control, interviewing researchers like MIT’s Albert Saiz to examine empirical evidence on how rent control affects affordability and urban development rather than relying on ideological talking points.

When he writes about falling housing prices, he frames the story around when price declines are good news for would-be buyers and when they signal deeper problems for the broader economy, connecting housing cycles to interest rates, credit conditions, and household balance sheets. That perspective recurs across his work: housing is not just about listings and construction, but about wealth distribution, access to opportunity, and the way government programs and market rules interact over time. His housing stories typically use academic papers, historical data, and case studies to give communications about real estate a macroeconomic and policy context.

Everyday economics: wealth, inflation, and financial markets

Beyond housing, Rosalsky often explains how broad economic forces show up in ordinary financial lives. In his reporting on millennial wealth, he compares millennials’ net worth to prior generations and walks through the roles of student debt, housing costs, and labor market conditions, grounding the story in Federal Reserve and other data rather than stereotypes about young adults. In a piece on a “strange billionaire” who revolutionized the bond market, he uses a biographical narrative to explain how innovations in bond trading changed global finance and what that means for savers and borrowers.

He frequently tackles inflation and the erosion of purchasing power in concrete, accessible ways. Rosalsky coined the term “skimpflation” to describe a form of inflation where companies keep prices the same but cut back on service quality, and he has reported on its rise as a way consumers experience economic stress in daily life. On the Indicator and Planet Money, he also covers “shrinkflation,” where package sizes get smaller while prices remain flat, illustrating how firms manage costs and margins in response to inflation pressures. His interest in interest rates is similarly grounded in long trends: he reports on how one prominent economist radically changed his mind about whether rates would stay low forever, using that reversal to explain the shift from a four-decade decline in rates to a more uncertain, volatile environment.

Turning academic research and big ideas into stories

A defining feature of Rosalsky’s work is his reliance on fresh economic research and theory to frame stories. In his newsletter essay on what America’s top economists are saying about AI and inequality, he reads through the latest conference papers to show that the predicted “AI job massacre” has not yet materialized, and that many studies find AI complementing workers and sometimes helping lower-skilled workers more than higher-skilled workers. He highlights the uncertainty in how AI will ultimately affect inequality, focusing on the choices embedded in technology design and public policy rather than treating outcomes as predetermined.

In the Planet Money essay on “pro-worker AI, streaming fatalities, and other fascinating new economic studies,” he again builds a narrative around recent academic work, summarizing economists’ proposals for tax reforms, grants, and intellectual property rules that would push AI in a more worker-friendly direction. He uses economic concepts like “pent-up demand” in historical pieces, such as his story on what 1919 teaches about surges in spending after periods of constraint, connecting post-war consumer booms to post-pandemic behavior. In interviews with authors of “Why Nations Fail,” he explores the institutional and political roots of why some countries grow rich and others remain poor, positioning macro-level governance questions alongside contemporary events like the Capitol riot.

Across these stories, Rosalsky’s hallmark is translating dense empirical work into clear prose and audio, with an emphasis on what the findings mean for policy design, inequality, and long-run economic dynamics. This research-forward style distinguishes him from beat reporters who focus narrowly on quarterly data releases or deal announcements; his interests lie in mechanisms, incentives, and the stories embedded in the numbers.

Newsletter voice and Planet Money storytelling

Rosalsky’s Planet Money newsletter provides a regular venue for his analytical, slightly playful voice, where he writes reported essays on topics like AI, housing programs, and unusual corners of the labor market. He also participates in Planet Money’s broader storytelling experiments, such as using the horror film “Alien” to explain why workers are not paid enough, blending pop culture and labor economics in a way that makes wage theories intuitive and memorable. On Planet Money episodes and specials like “Can’t Let It Go,” he brings a conversational tone to discussions of economic obsessions, while still grounding the talk in data and theory.

His audio work includes episodes that ask why we live in unusually innovative times, co-hosted with Darian Woods, where he connects technological progress to economic incentives and institutional structures. In another episode on “morally contested markets,” he applies an economic framework to markets for human organs, exploring how society decides which transactions are acceptable and which are taboo. This mix of newsletter essays, podcast hosting, and explanatory segments means his coverage can range from deeply reported policy analysis to thought experiments about markets and morality, but the through-line is consistent: he uses economics to unpack how systems work and what that means for people’s lives, with housing and other real-world markets as recurring arenas.