When Uncle Sam owned banks and factories

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• 00:09

  NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money.

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  I'm Darian Woods.

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  And I'm Weilin Wang.

• 00:16

  I don't know about you, Darian,

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  but lately I've been seeing some things in the news that have shaken my idea of what it means to do business in America.

• 00:24

  Are you talking about Zora and Mamdani's idea of opening government-owned grocery stores in New York City?

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  Well, that definitely got tongues wagging, I will say.

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  And then just this month, the Pentagon acquired a stake in a rare earth mining company.

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  And that's after the government took what's called a golden share in US steel.

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  The quintessential American economic myth is that the free market,

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  not the government, decides which businesses deserve investment and a shot of success.

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  Now we see the Trump administration becoming a partial owner in private businesses.

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  And this is actually history repeating itself.

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  The U.S. used to have a national investment bank.

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  This was a government-run entity that took on different forms during its life.

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  It bought up stakes in private banks and developed new manufacturing industries.

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  It even created the 30-year mortgage.

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  Economist Chris Hughes has studied the history of this bank.

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  It's sort of shocking how few people know that we had a national investment bank for 20 years in the United States.

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  And It was popular on both sides of the aisle,

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