The David McWilliams Podcast

By 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 importa

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FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 567 episodes available.

The David McWilliams Podcast episodes:

June 05, 2025 From Bolsheviks to Bolt: The Tallinnovation Nation
We’re on the road again, this time reporting from Vilnius, Lithuania, in the heart of Europe’s Bloodlands. Don’t be fooled by the history of war and trauma, this episode is all about how the Baltics are sprinting into the future. Estonia, with just 1.3 million people, has produced 10+ tech unicorns and collects 99% of its taxes online. Lithuania, home to 50,000 people living in Ireland, is building Rail Baltica, a €6 billion high-speed line connecting Finland to Poland. We chat with economist James Oates to unpack how these small nations became some of the most advanced societies on earth, all while keeping one wary eye on Moscow.
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36min
June 03, 2025 Creativity in the Cul-de-Sac: Why the Suburbs Won
Back home at HQ, we stretch our legs and dive into something huge hiding in plain sight: Ireland is now the most educated country in the world. But what does that really mean? From the Inhaler gig in St. Anne's Park to the brilliance of Roddy Doyle and camogie skirts, this episode celebrates the often-overlooked power of the suburbs, not just as a creative hotbed, but as the epicentre of Ireland’s education revolution. We trace how the children of small farmers became the middle class, why suburban snobbery is intellectually bankrupt, and how “kitchen table capital” helps some students stay the course. With fascinating data on dropout rates, international comparisons, and that ever-looming brain drain, this is a fresh and hopeful take on the biggest shift in Irish society since free education was introduced in 1967. Plus: why middle-class people think in years and working-class people are forced to think in minutes, and what it means for building a better Ireland.
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41min
May 29, 2025 Spain’s Miracle Economy: What They Got Right (That We Didn’t) with Joe Haslam
We're back in Spain, and I’ve got questions. Why is Spain growing faster than Germany, France, and even the US? Why can they build high-speed rail for a fraction of the cost, and why are they the only major EU country where immigration is boosting GDP without blowing up politics?
This week, we talk to Professor Joe Haslam in Madrid about what’s being called Europe’s miracle economy. Since COVID, Spain’s growth has outpaced every major European economy, driven by smart immigration (nearly 1 million working Latin Americans), a tourism boom (especially in the cooling north), and €160 billion in EU funds that they’ve actually used. But it’s not all cerveza and sunshine. Spain’s power grid recently collapsed for nine hours, revealing the fragility of the green energy transition. Despite the boom, Spain’s productivity and housing market are heading the wrong way. Public servants now outnumber private sector workers, and even El Guapo himself, PM Pedro Sánchez, is afraid to touch buy-to-lets. We also dig into what Spain’s infrastructure success says about Ireland’s failure. Is it Napoleon vs. Wellington all over again? Because if you inherited the Napoleonic state, like Spain did, you can build metros, fast trains, and affordable housing. If you inherited British common law? You get planning objections and overpriced shoeboxes in Drimnagh.

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44min
May 27, 2025 The Bilbao Blueprint
We're in Bilbao this week, and it’s got us thinking. How does a football club that refuses to sign non-Basque players manage to qualify for the Champions League, raking in close to €100 million from TV rights, match days, and UEFA money, while Dublin’s best bet is a few fivers from the Conference League? The answer is in economics. The Basques were Europe’s forgotten industrialists, the only region in Spain to undergo a full-blown Industrial Revolution, powered by local iron ore, steel production, and a shipbuilding boom that made Bilbao Spain’s biggest port by 1900. Then they lost it all. Globalisation, China, and the EU opened the floodgates. Unlike post-industrial towns in the UK or Ireland, Bilbao didn’t roll over. They moved the port. They built the Guggenheim. They chose ambition. And they proved that even a small, isolated, ancient people, who speak a pre-Ice Age language with no known relatives, can build a modern economy with global reach. What’s our excuse?
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32min
May 22, 2025 The Moody Blues: No More Finance Bros in LA
This week, we’re keeping one eye on Wall Street and the other on a canal in Dublin. Moody’s just downgraded the United States' credit rating, a move that quietly confirms what most won’t say out loud: America’s debt-fuelled growth is unsustainable, and interest payments are now outpacing military spending. Meanwhile, back home, a row of cottages literally collapsed, not abandoned, but owned by the very people lobbying to fix Ireland’s housing crisis. In a country where average rents just passed €2,000. In this episode, we tie it all together: the real consequences of debt, the performative hypocrisy at the top, and how property in Ireland has become a parasitic asset, not a social good. From Donald Trump’s inflationary tariff plans to the Irish State’s inability to enforce basic upkeep, we’re watching the scaffolding of credibility, financial and moral, fall away.
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33min
May 20, 2025 The Battle for Africa with Pumi Mashigo
From wine valleys to White House stand-offs, we’re in South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy finds itself caught between China, Russia, and a sulking Uncle Sam. Reporting from Franschhoek, we trace the Huguenot legacy, the Dutch East India Company, and how South Africa became the West’s favourite refuelling stop, until now. With President “Cupcake” Ramaphosa headed to the White House this week, US aid frozen, and Afrikaner “refugees” granted asylum, tensions are flaring. South African podcaster Pumi Mashigo joins us to unpack the realignment: BRICS, Palestine, misinformation campaigns, and why the Global South is finally saying: enough.
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43min
May 15, 2025 Trump’s New Enemies: Billionaires, Big Pharma & Bibi?
Trump is stealing Bernie’s manifesto. In this episode, we dive into why Trump is suddenly talking about taxing the rich and slashing the cost of prescription drugs, policies lifted straight from the progressive left. Is he turning on the billionaire donors funding his campaign? And is Israel, long a pet cause of those donors, being quietly edged out of Trump’s new MAGA calculus? We unpack a flurry of recent deals, from a largely meaningless UK–US trade agreement , to an urgent truce with China after Chinese exports to the US through the Port of LA fell by 50%. Behind the white smoke: a looming summer of empty shelves, rising inflation, and a reminder that America’s economic dominance isn’t what it used to be. Meanwhile, Ireland exports more to the US than the UK does, despite being 12 times smaller, but could soon find itself caught in the crossfire if the US starts attaching China-related conditions to EU trade.
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32min
May 13, 2025 A Letter from Africa with Simon Kuper
This week I'm in South Africa on a book and speaking tour and am chatting at the Franschoek Literary Festival, so we are all South Africa today. A country of contradictions, rich in resources, vibrant in culture, yet S.A. is held back by inequality, corruption, and the long shadow of apartheid. In this episode, we explore its uneasy present and remarkable past: from Mandela’s legacy to Elon Musk’s childhood, from empire and race to why Donald Trump has fixated on white Afrikaners. We travel through Cape Town and Johannesburg, unpacking it all with FT journalist Simon Kuper, and along the way, we encounter pencil tests, Springboks, slabs of the Berlin Wall, and the political ghosts of the Cold War. Is South Africa being used, once again, as a pawn in someone else’s game?
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52min
May 08, 2025 Inflation for Losers with Mark Blyth
Broadcast from a wine-soaked table in Italy’s Valle di Comino, ancestral home of Ireland’s chipper dynasties, this episode covers everything from Irish-Italian football matches and Elvis impersonators to the far more serious threat inflation poses to liberal democracy. We chat to political economist Mark Blyth about his new book Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers, unpicking why prices stay stubbornly high, who inflation hits hardest, and how it quietly fuels everything from MAGA to Farage. Is inflation just economics, or is it the force tearing apart the political centre ground? And is the UK a basket case… or just ahead of the curve?
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42min
May 06, 2025 How Canada Became the Anti-Trump Blueprint
This week, we talk about the most unexpected political shift of the year, Canada’s sudden transformation into the liberal world’s new playbook. We unpack how Mark Carney, once a Davos technocrat, won an election by turning it into a referendum on Trump… and won big. Along the way, we explore nationalism (the decent kind), what Trump gets wrong about trade, and why standing up to bullies actually works. Plus, we chat with Evan Solomon, now an MP in Carney’s new government, about what Canadians really want, what’s next for their economy, and how sometimes, all it takes to wake up a country is a common enemy.
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43min

FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 567 episodes available.

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