The Economics of the Merchant of Venice: Lessons from an Empire of Trade

What happens when a country produces more graduates than it has elite jobs to give them? According to Peter Turchin, the Russian-American thinker behind End Times, that's exactly the moment civilisations start to crack. This week, we get into his theory of "elite overproduction" and ask whether Ireland is staring straight into it. We unpack the stats: most educated population in the EU, master's degrees doubling in 15 years, and nearly one in three graduates working in jobs that don't need a degree. We talk about why the barista with a first-class honours and the barman with an economics master's are not just funny anecdotes, they're leading indicators of political instability. We look at how the public sector is quietly absorbing the overflow that the private sector can't, why AI is about to pour petrol on the fire, and why historically it's not the abject poor who revolt, it's the relatively rich and bitterly disappointed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UAE has just walked out of OPEC after nearly 60 years, and the timing is no accident. This week, we head to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to ask what's really going on. Why now? Why leave the cartel in the middle of a war? What does it mean for the price of petrol in your car, for Trump's midterms, and for the geopolitics of the Gulf? We get into the strange tacit alliance between the UAE and Israel, why Iran's real leverage isn't the Straits of Hormuz but the Emirates themselves, and how Saudi Arabia's old swing-producer power is being quietly dismantled. We also draw a much bigger lesson for small countries everywhere, including Ireland: the multilateral world that small states have hidden inside since the 1940s is breaking down, and the UAE's gamble is a glimpse of the hard choices that lie ahead. Oil, war, money, and the end of an era, all in one episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Sinead O'Sullivan is back, and she's got an answer that official Ireland really doesn't want to hear. We dig into the "failure premium", the staggering cost of a state that knows how to hand out subsidies but has forgotten how to coordinate, build, or own anything. We follow the money: why HAP quietly inflates the rent into the landlord's pocket, why housing a refugee costs €99 a night here and €13 in the Netherlands, and why we're paying premium prices for second-rate outcomes across housing, health, and infrastructure. We look at how a country adapts to dysfunction, sheds in back gardens, hollowed-out city centres, kids emigrating, until we stop noticing it's not normal. What happens when the multinational money slows down and we're left holding the infrastructure deficit we never fixed? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ireland is now officially the worst country in Europe for young entrepreneurs. Just 5.1% of our 20-somethings are building their own businesses, less than half the rate in Slovakia. So what the hell happened? This week, we ask why young Irish people have stopped backing themselves, and why a country that looks rich on paper is quietly losing the very people who make economies dance. We get into the difference between wealth that's extracted (the multinationals) and wealth that's created (the Ryanairs), and why one is far more fragile than it looks. We bring in Schumpeter and Nassim Taleb, follow a hypothetical 27-year-old called Kiera as the numbers crush her before she's even begun, and ask whether Ireland has become a nation of doubters, quietly punishing anyone who dares to have a go. We float a fix: stop parking the multinational windfall in a pension fund our 25-year-olds will never see, and turn it into a startup fund they can actually use. Because without risk-takers, there's no return, and without return, there's no economy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The global economy runs on one thing: the US dollar. What happens when trust in that system starts to crack? In this episode, we go deep into the mechanics of global finance, from dollar “swap lines” to shadow banking, to explain how the United States became the financial centre of the world, and why that dominance may now be under threat. At the heart of it all is a simple but unsettling reality: America doesn’t just produce goods, it produces money. The rest of the world needs dollars to trade, invest, and survive financial shocks. That gives the US enormous power, but also creates dangerous imbalances. We explore how decades of financialisation have concentrated wealth and influence in a small group of investors, reshaping both the American economy and global politics. Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions, particularly around Iran, raise a bigger question: could a single strategic misstep do to the US what the Suez Crisis did to Britain, quietly ending its era of dominance? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.