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 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 Ireland but in Europe and further afield. Globalisation has brought us all together. We all face similar challenges whether you live in Dublin, London, Minnesota or Milan.
If you would like to...
Series Episodes
Alexander Hamilton: How a Caribbean Orphan Built America
250 years on, we ask the question: would America even exist without Alexander Hamilton? We tell the story of the French-speaking outsider who created the dollar, faced down the states, and set the world's biggest economy in motion, before being murdered in one of history's strangest duels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
38 mins
7 July Finished
Ireland's Silent Sell Off and the Employee Ownership Solution
Every day that the Irish Financial Service Centre is open, they're selling an Irish business into foreign ownership. Since 2018, overseas acquirers have spent over €100 billion buying up Irish companies. I'm joined by Alan Coleman to look at why this is happening. We look at employee ownership trusts as a solution already working in the UK and Canada, the tax barriers holding it back in Ireland, and the surprising historical Irish precedent for the idea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
31 mins
6 July Finished
The Death of the American Dream
SpaceX just IPO'd, surged, and torched billions of small investors. It's the new American economy. From prediction markets to crypto to day-trading teens, we look at how the US quietly turned itself into the world's biggest casino, and why young Americans are gambling because they've given up on working. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
32 mins
2 July Finished
The Man Who Broke the Global Economy
Alan Greenspan just died at 100, and he might be the most consequential person of the last 30 years that nobody talks about. We unpack the wild story of the jazz clarinettist turned Fed chairman, the Ayn Rand cult he came from, the "Greenspan Put" that quietly rigged Wall Street, and why his fingerprints are all over Ireland's 2008 crash. Plus a strange historical twist: was Alan Greenspan related to the Jewish teenager whose shooting triggered Kristallnacht? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
41 mins
30 June Finished
Why Did Brazil Never Make It?
The country of the future has been stuck in the future for 100 years. We dig into Brazil's wild economic story; slavery, the secret "whitening" immigration policy that sent millions of Italians south, and why Brazilian football carries the weight of a whole nation's identity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
35 mins
24 June Finished
