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 com...

  • 40 minutes 25 seconds
    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 creates jobs? From there, we go back to Ireland in 1990, when employment had barely moved in forty years and emigration still felt like the national destiny. So what changed? We unpack the extraordinary shift that turned Ireland from an economy exporting its young people into one of the strongest job creators in Europe: devaluation, falling interest rates, the Berlin Wall dividend, peace in the North, American investment, and a transformed national mood. Politicians love talking about “job creation,” yet jobs are not created by speeches, slogans, or government press releases. Jobs come after demand, after sales, after risk, after somebody decides to build something, sell something, and back themselves. In other words: jobs are derived from entrepreneurship.

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    24 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 36 minutes 53 seconds
    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 widening. From electric cars to fast fashion, Chinese firms are flooding markets with cheaper, faster, and increasingly better products, and Europe is struggling to respond. The real story is actually stranger. We dive into the rise of the “parcel economy,” where billions of low-value packages bypass traditional retail, and the even more surreal “shed economy,” where informal logistics networks are quietly distributing Chinese goods across Europe. Can Europe still produce anything at all? If one country can make everything cheaper, what’s left for everyone else? And if trade stops being two-way, does free trade itself break down? Was Trump right all along?



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    19 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 51 minutes 26 seconds
    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 migrants who helped shape revolutionary America, to the famine generation who built the unions, churches, police forces, and political machines of the great US cities, this episode traces the long economic story of Irish emigration and Irish America. However, this is also about the present, is there still such a thing as a coherent Irish America, or has it dissolved into the wider American mainstream? If the old bonds are fading, should Ireland be doing far more to reconnect with the tribe abroad? On a day when Ireland celebrates itself to the world, we ask what the diaspora gave us, what remains of that identity now, and how a small country might think much bigger about one of its greatest global assets.

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    17 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 28 minutes 18 seconds
    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 shockwaves already rippling out from Iran: surging oil and gas prices, rising shipping and insurance costs, higher food and fertilizer bills, and the growing threat of a 1970s-style stagflation shock. This is the old nightmare back again, prices rising while growth slows. We explain why the Straits of Hormuz matters so much, why Europe is far more exposed than America, how energy shocks feed into mortgages, inflation and consumer confidence, and why even countries with no direct trade with Iran will still feel the pain. From Beirut to Dublin, from jet fuel to grocery bills, this is the economics of a war that could redraw the Middle East as well as the global economy too.



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    12 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 47 minutes 28 seconds
    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 America’s Cold War obsession with the Soviet Union mutated into something else entirely: the gradual Israelisation of U.S. policy in the region. Along the way we trace the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America’s backing of the Mujahideen, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Intifadas, Oslo, Netanyahu, Hamas, and the long collapse of any serious Palestinian settlement. What began as a struggle over oil, empire, and superpower rivalry became a different kind of conflict altogether, one driven by proxy wars, sectarian alliances, occupation, and political miscalculation. If part one explained how the West lost Iran, part two explains how the region was remade in the decades that followed, and how all of it leads directly to the crisis we are watching now.

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    10 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 46 minutes 58 seconds
    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 economic and political history that reshaped Iran from the 1940s to the 1979 revolution. From Britain’s oil empire and the CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to the rise of the Shah as America’s key ally in the Cold War, we explore how oil, empire, and superpower rivalry transformed Iran into a strategic battleground. Along the way we look at the choke points of global energy, the Suez crisis, the birth of the CIA’s regime-change playbook, and the corruption and inequality that ultimately ignited revolution. 

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    5 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 41 minutes 16 seconds
    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 Nobel Prize–winning AI pioneer Demis Hassibis, we unpack how AI is reshaping medicine, productivity, profits, and power, and why markets are now rewarding mass layoffs as a sign of progress. From Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction to Jack Dorsey’s AI-driven job cuts and the explosion of “buy now, pay later” debt, we trace how AI is intensifying inequality, short-termism, and financial fragility. Is this the next great leap forward, or the beginning of a techno-feudal economy where a small elite extracts value at scale? We explore why equilibrium economics no longer makes sense, why evolution never waits for permission, and whether democracy can keep up with machines that learn faster than society can adapt

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    3 March 2026, 4:00 am
  • 39 minutes 58 seconds
    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 upside if it can ever stop tripping over its own history. We look at why Serbia sits so close to Russia, why Kosovo still blocks the country’s European future, and how war, sanctions, hyperinflation, and decades of bad leadership turned a natural crossroads into an economic cul-de-sac. A new generation is pushing back against corruption and state capture, and culture may be moving faster than politics, from packed derby stadiums in Belgrade to a runaway rom-com hit about a Croat-Serb wedding that’s quietly rewriting the story. If the Balkans can turn rivalry into cooperation, it could become one of Europe’s great comeback economies.

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    26 February 2026, 4:00 am
  • 38 minutes 28 seconds
    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 eastern Bosnia, where Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina uses one structure to tell a five-century story of tribes, trade, love, and conflict. Back in Ireland, the row over closing the old Killaloe bridge is about suburban sprawl swallowing once-separate towns and turning them into commuter satellites. Ireland has built a low-density model that forces people into cars, clogs villages with traffic, and makes the whole system fragile. Just 13% of Irish people live in apartments, compared to 46% across Europe, and the gap between where jobs and services are concentrated and where people actually live is now being paid for in time, congestion, and quality of life. So where do you look for a better model? Japan. We end in the Tokyo–Yokohama mega-region, 38 million people living densely, safely, and efficiently, and ask why Ireland keeps choosing a “rainbelt” version of American car sprawl, instead of building compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods that let people live near where they work, study and socialise.

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    24 February 2026, 4:00 am
  • 36 minutes 55 seconds
    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 engineers are becoming the horses of the 21st century. Just as the steam engine replaced animal labour, AI is now eating the lunch of human coders, automating what was once seen as elite, technical, and irreplaceable. Stock markets are already reacting, wiping value from software-heavy firms as investors realise that AI’s economic value will be measured the same way steam engines were: by how much labour they eliminate. We trace this moment through history, from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of the nerd after 1984, and ask what happens when an entire generation’s promised career suddenly looks like drudge work dressed up as genius. As 'vibe coding' replaces programming languages, and English replaces hieroglyphic code, technical skill is being commoditised at speed. AI is also stripping the human element out of markets, trading, and commerce itself, replacing noisy, emotional trading floors with silent machines trading in milliseconds. As technical skills lose their mystique, the economy may swing back toward the very things machines can’t replicate: empathy, creativity, comedy, poetry, and human judgment. 

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    19 February 2026, 4:00 am
  • 40 minutes 26 seconds
    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. When it contracts, the damage is slower, quieter, and far harder to see. In this episode, we trace what happens when banks stop lending and money stops doing its real work. Using Ireland as a case study, we show how domestic credit has collapsed since the crash, from banks lending 160% of deposits at the peak of the Celtic Tiger to barely 40% today, and why that matters far more than headline GDP figures. Drawing on history, from the silver mines of Potosí to Spain’s long decline, we explain why money is never neutral, why credit fuels growth in ways governments cannot replicate, and how multinational windfalls can mask a dangerously hollowed-out private economy. The result may look like prosperity, but it behaves more like stagnation.

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    17 February 2026, 4:00 am
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