Maria Aspan
Maria Aspan is the financial correspondent for NPR. She reports on the world of finance broadly, and how it affects all of our lives.
She comes to NPR from Fortune magazine, where she was a senior features writer. Her coverage included systemic inequities across startups and public companies, executive compensation, the business of health care, sexual harassment on Wall Street, and billionaire philanthropy. She won numerous awards for her work, including SPJ's Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in magazine journalism and honors from SABEW, NIHCM, Deadline Club, and others. She was a co-chair of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, and interviewed top CEOs and other newsmakers for the magazine and Fortune events.
She has been an editor and financial reporter for most of her career, having covered banking and the financial crisis for American Banker and Reuters. She then oversaw coverage of venture capital, fintech, and the startup financial ecosystem for Inc. magazine. She is the author of Startup Money Made Easy: The Inc. Guide to Every Financial Question About Starting, Running, and Growing Your Business (Harper Collins).
Her reporting on business and finance has taken her around the country and abroad; she traveled to Saudi Arabia to report on American companies doing business there, and returned to her hometown region of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, to report on the expanding cult business of Wawa.
She graduated from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and got her start in journalism as a Paris fashion assistant for the New York Times. She's based in New York City. [Copyright 2025 NPR]
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Some 154 million people in the United States get health care through their employer — and for many, their costs are about to go way up. -
The U.S. likely added 900,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months ending in March than had been reported, according to a preliminary Labor Department report. -
The president and his sons made $5 billion on paper as their cryptocurrency started trading — highlighting the extraordinary degree to which they are personally profiting from Trump's return to the Oval Office. -
This past week, AI darling Nvidia reported blockbuster financial results that beat analysts' expectations. But investors weren't impressed and the stock price dropped. -
Critics warn that Trump's demands for business leaders to step down, and for the government to take a cut of sales, threaten American-style capitalism. -
Americans love olive oil — and import 95% of it. But tariffs are making it harder for Europeans to sell it to Americans. -
Investors are reacting to Trump's latest plans to impose a wide range of tariffs. A weaker-than-expected jobs report magnified concerns about how these import taxes would impact the economy. -
Some big companies are reporting real financial pain from tariffs and economic uncertainty — but for others, business is booming. -
As they process President Trump's chaotic tariffs and other economic policies, some of the country's most powerful CEOs are moving from denial and bargaining to public anger and depression. -
"I just didn't think it would take this long," one veteran head of diversity, who's been job-hunting since last summer, tells NPR.
