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PODCAST

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams & John Davis

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 complicated is rarely important and what is important is rarely complicated.That will be our motto.Every week we are going to tease out some big economic or political issue facing us, not just here in

news & politics

All Episodes

38:14

Who Owns the Flag? From the American Revolution to...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/25

We’re in New York this week, celebrating my mam’s 90th birthday and launchingThe History of Moneyin the U.S., but the backdrop is America’s deepening culture war. With the 250th anniversary of the Revolution looming, both liberals and MAGA are fighting to “own” the flag, the story, and the soul of America. We dive into Ken Burns’s new PBS seriesThe American Revolution, the forgotten role of General O’Hara (an Irishman who surrendered for the British), and why 75% of Black troops fought for the

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48:21

The Economics of Golf

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/22

What doesgolftell us about money, power, and the way economies work? From billion-dollar sponsorship deals to the rise of LIVGolf, from Tiger Woods to Trump’sgolfcourses, the fairways ofgolfare lined with lessons about globalisation, soft power, and the business of status.In this episode, we tee off on the economics ofgolf, how a game that looks leisurely on the surface is actually a high-stakes arena of geopolitics, big business, and class.Along the way we explore why Ireland punches above its

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36:52

From Cod to Culture: What Inishmore Teaches Us About...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/18

Between 250,000-300,000 tourists land on the island every year, 2,500 a day in summer, and yet it still feels authentic, alive, and deeply Irish. In this episode, we ask: how do remote places like Inishmore thrive in today’s economy, while once-wealthy regions like France’s Île de Ré struggle with emptying out? We dig into the wild history of cod and salt (the currency of empires), why Ireland salted beef instead of fish, and how the Aran Islands are now punching above their weight in the

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34:57

Could the GAA Solve Ireland’s Housing Crisis?

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/16

What if the solution to Ireland’s housing crisis has been sitting on our doorstep all along? We dive into the Danish model of cooperative housing, where 7% of Danes live in co-ops, and a full third of Copenhageners do too,and explore how the GAA, with its 2,200 clubs and pristine community pitches in every village, could spearhead something similar here. Forget developer margins and speculative bubbles: in Denmark, a co-op share might cost €70–100k, with monthly housing costs around €800, compared

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37:47

Deepfakes, Big Tech, and the Coming AI Crash?

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/11

AI investment is exploding: the “Magnificent Seven” of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, and NVIDIA, are ploughing almost 7% of US GDP into AI and data centres. That’s the same scale as the US housing boom in 2006, and greater than the dot-com bubble at its peak. Today, just seven firms make up 34% of the S&P 500, the highest concentration in history. Earnings per share in these companies grew 37% last year, compared to just 6% in the rest of the index. But history warns us, RCA in

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39:05

France on the Brink: Debt, Drama, and a Possible...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/09

Broadcast from Île de Ré, we dive into France’s mounting fiscal mess and political paralysis. With Macron a lame-duck, bond markets charging Paris more than Athens, and a nationwide strike looming, we ask: could Europe’s cornerstone become its weakest link? We unpack France’s towering state-and-semi-state debts, why Japan can print and Paris can’t, the ECB’s “will they/won’t they” backstop if Le Pen takes power, and how a sovereignist turn could trigger a rewrite of France’s constitution, goodbye

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46:27

Economics in a Tent: Live at Electric Picnic 2025

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/04

We took economics to a music festival, and somehow packed the tent. In this Electric Picnic highlights episode from Mindfield, we rock up bleary-eyed and buzzing, then dive straight into the big stuff: what Trump’s assault on America’s institutions means for money, markets, and the rest of us. We map the new super-cycle from post-war social democracy to Reagan-Thatcher finance, to today’s populist reboot, and why we think the US is flirting with a fiscal, monetary, and dollar crunch. Closer to home,

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40:49

Is America The Richest Third World Country?

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/09/02

Is the US drifting into Peronism? We trace the playbook, tariffs and import substitution, national champions, censorship-by-intimidation, and a war on independent institutions, and map it onto Trump’s America: sacking a Fed governor, menacing J-Powell, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, deploying the National Guard, and the Treasury taking a slice of Intel. Along the way, we tell the family story that makes the point better than any chart: two Italian brothers leave Lombardy in 1950,

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36:52

Germany, 10 Years After “Wir Schaffen Das”, What...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/28

Ten years ago, Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to more than 1.1 million asylum seekers in a single year with the words “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”). Today, Germany has over 3.4 million asylum seekers, about 4% of its population, and politics, society, and culture have been transformed. In this episode, we dive into what really happened over the last decade. We talk with historian Katja Hoyer about the numbers, the culture clashes, the rise of the AfD from a fringe party to polling at

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33:56

The Nationalisation of the New Home Market

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/26

The state has quietly become the biggest buyer of new homes. In fact, builders like Cairn Homes now have forward sales of nearly €946 million, much of it locked in by government deals. That means up to 80–85% of new builds are being bought by the state, at an average price of €382,000 per unit, while wages lag far behind rising house prices, which jumped 7.8% last year. So who’s being pushed out? First-time buyers. Instead of solving the housing crisis, the state is inflating prices, nationalising

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41:14

Ukraine at the Crossroads: From Donetsk to the...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/21

After nearly 11 years of war, Putin’s maximalist demands have shrunk to a sliver of land in Donetsk, a pyrrhic victory after countless lives lost and millions displaced. But while the Kremlin clings to a symbolic scrap of territory, we explore whether Ukraine’s true future lies not in NATO membership but in becoming what political economist Harold Laswell once called a “garrison state.” What does that mean? Think of countries like Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, or even Finland in 1940: highly

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38:47

Ireland is a Hostage to Fortune

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/19

Have we caught a case of Dutch Disease? Ireland’s dependence on foreign multinationals looks less like a golden goose and more like Japanese knotweed, invasive, overwhelming, and slowly strangling everything around it. Yes, the jobs are plentiful and the tax coffers are bulging, but the hidden costs are piling up: small businesses being elbowed out, rents spiralling, public spending ballooning, and a state increasingly captured by the very companies it courts. We trace how multinationals now pay

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40:09

America’s Dutch Disease: How Debt Became the World’s...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/14

We’ve always known Dutch Disease as what happens when a country strikes oil or gas and accidentally hollows out the rest of its economy. But what if the United States’ great “resource discovery” wasn’t energy, it was debt? This week we talk to Brendan Greeley about his brilliant framework for understanding America’s political economy: the world’s insatiable appetite for U.S. Treasuries has turned debt into a commodity tap Washington can turn on at will. We explore how this constant borrowing props

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26:46

From The Godfather to the Blockchain: How Easy Money...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/12

We’ve always said to understand the economy, you have to understand human nature, and nothing reveals that better than watching the biggest players do a Godfather-style U-turn for easy money. In this episode, we connect the dots between Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone and Jamie Dimon’s pivot from calling crypto “a fraud” to using it as loan collateral, all while the President of the United States holds stakes in coins of his own. We unpack how the $2 trillion crypto market has morphed from anti-Wall

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41:13

Japan: Lost in Translation Part Two

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/07

We all love a boom story, until it turns into a 40‑year hangover. In 1995, Japan’s nominal GDP hit its high‑water mark. It took until the 2020s to get back there. Debt has exploded to250% of GDP. The population is shrinking so fast that by 2070, one in three Japanese will have vanished, down from128 million in 2010 to just 87 million. What went wrong? A bursting property bubble, a banking system in denial, and a culture where shame trumps change. For four decades, Japan has been the economic

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43:12

Japan: From Feudal Isolation to Economic Superpower

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/08/05

This week marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we’re taking a deep dive into Japan’s extraordinary economic story. In part one of our two-part series, we explore how Japan went from a feudal, isolated society to one of the most powerful economies in the world. With our guest Russell Jones, a brilliant economist and my old boss, we look at the Meiji Restoration, post-war reconstruction under America’s wing, and the wild property and stock market bubble of the 1980s

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33:16

Generation Rent: How Housing Costs Are Exporting...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/07/31

This week we talk to Matthew Ruddy, a young Dublin entrepreneur who did everything right - built his first business at 17, worked alongside the lads at Dogpatch Labs. Except he's now living in Brisbane, not Dublin.Matthew's story captures what's happening to an entire generation. These aren't traditional emigrants heading to London building sites, they're highly educated risk-takers who desperately want to stay home but can't afford to take entrepreneurial risks when rent costs two grand a month

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32:46

Did Europe Just Surrender to Trump?

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/07/29

Not so fast! We unpack the surprise EU-US trade deal that has everyone shoutingselloutbut we see it differently. In this episode, we take a deeper look at what really went down in the Trump-triggered tariff negotiations. The headlines scream defeat: Europe folds, Trump wins, 15% tariffs slapped on all EU goods while the US gets full access to the European market. But is that the full story? We break it down, the EU runs a$200 billion trade surpluswith the US. So why would they agree to this? Because

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46:31

When the West Woke Up: How Yugoslavia Fell Apart

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/07/24

This week, we take you back to the final years of Yugoslavia, a country that exploded into one of the bloodiest wars Europe has seen since WWII. We trace how ethnic tensions, decades of suppressed rivalries, and opportunistic leaders tore the region apart, while Europe watched on, paralysed. We explore how the Serb army launched brutal assaults across Croatia and Bosnia, committing acts of ethnic cleansing that left over 100,000 Bosnians dead, often at the hands of their own neighbours. For years,

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38:13

From Huaco to Hackathons: Why Ireland Must Rethink...

The David McWilliams Podcast ·

2025/07/22

In this week’s episode, we dive headfirst into the economic storm clouds gathering over Ireland, and the urgent need to act before we get soaked. We explore how U.S. tariffs, Trumpian MAGA economics, and a Europe shrinking on the global stage all combine to put Ireland in the danger zone. We break it down simply: Trump’s $50 billion in new tariffs? Instead of hurting China, they’re taxing Americans. If America turns fully inward, the knock-on effect for Ireland could be devastating. We're the most

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