The David McWilliams Podcast
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The David McWilliams Podcast
The aim of this weekly podcast is to make economics easy, uncomplicated and accessible. With the world at a political, technological and financial tipping point, economics has never been so important to all of us and yet, it’s made inaccessible and complicated by so many.I’ve always thought what is...
Episodis Recents
648 episodis
Why Some Countries Create Jobs and Others Export People
Broadcasting from South Africa, a country of huge energy, huge potential, and brutally high unemployment, we use that lens to ask what actually create...
Shedonomics: Can Europe Survive China’s Manufacturing Machine?
In this episode, we unpack the new China shock, as exports to Europe surge nearly 30% in just two months and a €359 billion trade deficit keeps wideni...
St Patrick's Day Special: Who Exactly Are The Irish Americans?
On St. Patrick’s Day, we go beyond the parades and pints to ask: what does the Irish diaspora actually mean for Ireland today? From the Presbyterian m...
The Economics of War
What happens to the global economy when a war erupts at the world’s most important energy choke point? In this episode, we trace the economic shockwav...
America's Road to Tehran - Part 2
In part two of our history of Iran and the Middle East, we move from the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the bombing of Tehran today. This is the story of...
How the West Lost Iran: Oil, Coups, and the Road to Revolution - Part 1
Iran didn’t suddenly become the geopolitical flashpoint it is today, the roots go back decades. In this first part of a two-part series, we trace the...
Can Democracy Survive an AI Economy?
In this episode, we ask what happens when economic evolution moves from human speed to machine speed. Fresh from an off-the-record discussion with a N...
Can Europe’s “Hidden Continent” Finally Break Free?
Broadcast from Serbia, this episode dives into the Balkans, the most misunderstood, most underestimated corner of Europe, and one with the biggest ups...
Can You Prosper Without Building Proper Cities?
This episode begins at the ancient seven-arch bridge in Killaloe, the crossing point where Clare, Tipp and Limerick collide, and jumps to Višegrad in...
Revenge of the Nerds
For forty years, the software engineer was the hero of the modern economy. That era may now be ending, fast. In this episode, we argue that software e...
What Happens to an Economy When Credit Stops Flowing?
Credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy. When it expands, ideas turn into companies, small builders become employers, and innovation compounds. Wh...
Can the New Fed Boss Shrink QE Without Crashing Everything?
If central banks “control money,” why do we still get credit booms, banking crises, and bubbles, and what can a new Fed chair actually do about it? Wh...
Why Did Bitcoin Crash Again? The Scam That’s Been Around Since Dante
Not even “thermodynamically sound energy through time and space” makes Bitcoin money. In this episode, we take another hammer to the sacred cow of cry...
Swipe Left on Society: Singledom, Sexless Men, and the New Politics of Loneliness with Aideen McQueen
We think the biggest cultural shift of the last 15 years is inflation, immigration, or housing. It isn’t. It’s singledom, a shockwave moving through W...
Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference with Rutger Bregman
In a world where “might is right” is having an ugly little renaissance, Rutger Bregman returns as the perfect antidote: a stubborn, data-backed case t...
Ireland’s American Problem: The Jockey, the Horses, and the End of the Easy Money Era
Ireland has spent the last two decades riding a unique position: European by treaty, American by economics, a “bridgehead” for US multinationals into...
The Great Global Rebalancing: How Trump's America is Losing its Grip on the World's Capital with Sony Kapoor
Everyone watched Trump at Davos and thought they were seeing American power. We think they were seeing something else: a flashing warning light. The...
The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy!
This episode is a deep dive into a simple claim: This is the year the mask slipped. The United States has decided that the grand bargain it presided o...
Trump vs. The Fed: Sabotage, Showdown, or Economic Revolution?
Donald Trump is taking aim at the most powerful, and most opaque, institution in the global economy: the Federal Reserve. By moving to oust Jay Powell...
The Great Uncoupling & Fiscal Crisis: America, Europe & the Bond Market Reckoning
America and Europe are drifting apart, not just politically, but philosophically. In this episode, we dig into the consequences of that split, compari...
The Bipolar Economy: Trump, Oil & the End of Balance with Carole Nakhle
In a single week, Donald Trump goes after the Federal Reserve, criminalises Jerome Powell, and shakes the idea of central bank independence, the quiet...
Venezuela Falls, Cuba Trembles with Marla Dukharan
Washington moved on Venezuela, and the shockwaves are racing across the Americas. Oil, refugees, collapsed regimes, back-room deals: this may spell th...
After Maduro: Who Really Runs Venezuela Now? with Juan Tokatlian
Broadcasting from the streets of Medellín, we dive into Latin America’s reaction to the stunning removal of Nicolás Maduro, and the strange new realit...
What If 2026 Is the Year America Leaves Us Behind?
It’s 2026, and Ireland is skating on a thin economic edge. With the US retreating from Europe, American industry is stalling here, no new labs, no new...
What's Really Going on In Venezuela? Oil, Empire & the Next Proxy War
Venezuela once rivalled Switzerland in wealth, today it’s produced more refugees than Syria. What happened? We go straight to Buenos Aires to talk to...
2025: China’s Year
For 2,000 years, China has played a different game. While Europe fragmented, fought, and conquered outward, China focused inward, on standardisation,...
Was Genghis Khan the World’s First Globalist?
We usually remember Genghis Khan as history’s ultimate destroyer but what if he was also its first great economic integrator? In this episode, we reth...
Can Wind Power Make Us Rich Again?
Ireland controls seven times more sea than land, and with the Atlantic blowing 25% stronger winds than the North Sea, we sit on one of the greatest un...
Europe Under Threat: Can the Centre Hold?
Europe is under pressure militarily, economically, and politically. NATO spending is up 45% since 2014. Germany’s exports to China have dropped 11% in...
The Great Affordability Lie?
Around the world, people feel poorer, even when the numbers say we’ve never been richer. In Ireland, GDP is soaring, household wealth has more than do...
Petty Lines in the Sand
We’re diving into the economics of borders, the lines we pretend are ancient but were mostly scratched into the earth by soldiers, surveyors and empir...
China Explained with Dan Wang
We talk to writer and analyst Dan Wang, whose book Breakneck argues that China is an engineering state, run by people who build, while America, Irelan...
Is Central Asia the Next Front Line of Global Power? with Peter Frankopan
Leaving the US after weeks on the road, we zoom out from New York and Washington and asks a question we almost never ask in Europe: what if the real f...
Why Can’t the West Build Anymore?
Reporting from New York, with a Bitcoin slump at his heels and the Hollywood-launch buzz of Money: A Story of Humanity still in the air, we dive into...
Is $4,000 Gold the First Crack in the Fiat Era?
Broadcasting from under the Hollywood sign in the middle of a rare Californian downpour, we follow the water straight into the gold. Starting with LA...
Hollywood, Soft Power & Ireland’s Anti-American Left?
Reporting from West Hollywood, in a rock ’n’ roll hotel with no parties and no drugs as house rules. We take a walk down Sunset Boulevard and into the...
Vibecession, AI Mania & The New Casino Economy with Kyla Scanlon
Live at Kilkenomics, we welcome Roscommon's own economics star Kyla Scanlon author of In This Economy for a fast, funny, and razor-sharp tour of where...
The Tech Crash, The Demographic Time Bomb, and Ireland’s Future 40
A tech bubble always feels rational until it doesn’t, as Wall Street fuses with Silicon Valley and the entire American economy becomes a single hyper-...
The Pope’s Children at 20: How Ireland Grew Up
Twenty years ago, The Pope’s Children changed how Ireland saw itself; a country high on credit, confidence, and Celtic Tiger ambition. Two decades lat...
Australia, Argentina & Ireland: A Tale of Three Economies
Australia is the country Argentina should’ve been, and the country Ireland could become. Seventy years ago, Argentina and Australia stood side by side...