The David McWilliams Podcast

Donald Trump is taking aim at the most powerful, and most opaque, institution in the global economy: the Federal Reserve. By moving to oust Jay Powell through a criminal investigation, Trump has triggered a battle that cuts to the heart of who really controls money in America, and by extension, the world. Is this an unprecedented act of economic sabotage? A dangerous authoritarian power grab? Or i...

America and Europe are drifting apart, not just politically, but philosophically. In this episode, we dig into the consequences of that split, comparing today’s transatlantic rupture to one of the most overlooked geopolitical divorces of the 20th century: China’s break from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. We explore how competing worldviews, liberal restraint versus autocratic power are reshaping g...

In a single week, Donald Trump goes after the Federal Reserve, criminalises Jerome Powell, and shakes the idea of central bank independence, the quiet pillar holding the global financial system together. At the same time, two oil superpowers, Venezuela and Iran, slide into fresh instability. Coincidence? Not quite. We unpack a world that feels wildly out of balance. In the U.S., markets are boomin...

Washington moved on Venezuela, and the shockwaves are racing across the Americas. Oil, refugees, collapsed regimes, back-room deals: this may spell the beginning of the end for Cuba’s 65-year experiment, and the most dramatic geopolitical reset in the region since 1989. We head to the Caribbean to ask who wins, who loses, and who has been quietly complicit all along. Economist Marla Dukaran joins...

Broadcasting from the streets of Medellín, we dive into Latin America’s reaction to the stunning removal of Nicolás Maduro, and the strange new reality taking shape in Caracas. Is this regime change, an oil grab, or something far more experimental? We’re joined again by Latin America analyst Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, who argues this is the birth of something unprecedented: a U.S.-managed protectorat...

It’s 2026, and Ireland is skating on a thin economic edge. With the US retreating from Europe, American industry is stalling here, no new labs, no new factories. Our entire model of tax-light, job-rich multinational growth might be reaching its sell-by date. The housing crisis rages, younger people emigrate, and a risk-averse political class hides behind admin. We break down the "known knowns" for...

Venezuela once rivalled Switzerland in wealth, today it’s produced more refugees than Syria. What happened? We go straight to Buenos Aires to talk to leading Latin American analyst Juan Gabriel Tokatlian about how a petrostate collapsed without a war, why US policy is pushing the region to the edge, and what might really be behind American naval deployments off the Venezuelan coast. Is regime chan...

For 2,000 years, China has played a different game. While Europe fragmented, fought, and conquered outward, China focused inward, on standardisation, stability, and turning a vast empire into a single nation. In this episode, we explore why China emerged from 2025 stronger than any other power, why it has no interest in ruling the world, and why that restraint may be its greatest strength. From th...

We usually remember Genghis Khan as history’s ultimate destroyer but what if he was also its first great economic integrator? In this episode, we rethink the Mongol Empire not as pure terror, but as the largest continuous free‑trade zone the world has ever seen, stretching from Korea to Ukraine. By reopening the Silk Road after a thousand years, the Mongols allowed ideas, technologies, and capital...

Ireland controls seven times more sea than land, and with the Atlantic blowing 25% stronger winds than the North Sea, we sit on one of the greatest untapped energy jackpots on Earth. This episode dives into the staggering 600 gigawatt potential of offshore wind off Ireland’s coast, enough to power every home and factory in the EU, several times over. So why haven’t we built a new offshore wind far...

Europe is under pressure militarily, economically, and politically. NATO spending is up 45% since 2014. Germany’s exports to China have dropped 11% in a single year. France is bracing for a possible far-right presidency. Here in Ireland, neutrality suddenly feels less like a principle and more like a liability. In this episode, we ask: is Europe still a power bloc, or just a museum with great croi...

Around the world, people feel poorer, even when the numbers say we’ve never been richer. In Ireland, GDP is soaring, household wealth has more than doubled since 2014, and yet most families are pinned to their collar. Why? Because the official poverty line is €33,600, but it now takes at least €52,000 a year just to stay afloat. That’s a 40% gap between what’s measured and what’s felt. Rent has pa...

We’re diving into the economics of borders, the lines we pretend are ancient but were mostly scratched into the earth by soldiers, surveyors and empire-builders with rulers. From Ukraine’s shifting frontlines to Dublin’s Herzog Park, to Northern Ireland’s uneasy edges, we trace how geography becomes politics. Then we go back to the original culprit: William Petty, Cromwell’s cartographer, the man...

We talk to writer and analyst Dan Wang, whose book  Breakneck  argues that China is an  engineering state,  run by people who build, while America, Ireland and the wider Anglosphere have become  lawyer states,  run by people who litigate. China lays highways and high-speed rail at warp speed; common-law countries file objections and environmental reports. Europe, mean...

Leaving the US after weeks on the road, we zoom out from New York and Washington and asks a question we almost never ask in Europe: what if the real future of geopolitics isn’t in Brussels, Beijing or DC, but in Central Asia? To get there, we bring in historian Peter Frankopan, author of  The Silk Roads , to map the region we lazily call “the Stans”; Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyz...

Reporting from New York, with a Bitcoin slump at his heels and the Hollywood-launch buzz of  Money: A Story of Humanity  still in the air, we dive into one of the most important economic questions of 2025: why can America, Ireland, and Britain no longer build the infrastructure that made them great? From the riveted, soot-stained genius of the New York subway to China’s ability to throw...

Broadcasting from under the Hollywood sign in the middle of a rare Californian downpour, we follow the water straight into the gold. Starting with LA as a city built on pure imagination, we jump back to the original gold rushes that reshaped the map: California in 1849, the Australian fields, the Klondike, and the deep shafts of South Africa. We meet Johann Sutter and the prospector who accidental...

Reporting from West Hollywood, in a rock ’n’ roll hotel with no parties and no drugs as house rules. We take a walk down Sunset Boulevard and into the strange engine of L.A.: a city built almost entirely on imagination, storytelling and constant reinvention. From Mulholland’s aqueduct to the studios that wrote America’s myths, we asks: what does a place like this tell us about capitalism, churn an...

Live at Kilkenomics, we welcome Roscommon's own economics star Kyla Scanlon author of  In This Economy  for a fast, funny, and razor-sharp tour of where money and mood collide. We get into her “vibecession” idea on why feelings beat spreadsheets, the AI splash that’s propping up markets, and why America is drifting from a work economy to a casino economy. Why are unprofita...

A tech bubble always feels rational until it doesn’t, as Wall Street fuses with Silicon Valley and the entire American economy becomes a single hyper-leveraged bet on AI, we trace the early tremors: falling job numbers, concentration of risk, a market propped up by story over profit. The real shock comes at home, Ireland’s new Future 40 report quietly maps out a country sleepwalking into decades o...

Twenty years ago, The Pope’s Children changed how Ireland saw itself; a country high on credit, confidence, and Celtic Tiger ambition. Two decades later, we’re back where it all began: the suburbs, the shopping centres, the bouncy castles and breakfast rolls that built a new middle class. We revisit the characters who defined an era, Decklanders, RoboPaddy, Breakfast Roll Man, and the forces that...

Australia is the country Argentina should’ve been, and the country Ireland could become. Seventy years ago, Argentina and Australia stood side by side as the world’s great hopes, rich in land, resources, and ambition. Today, one is a model of steady prosperity, the other a warning wrapped in inflation and political theatre. We dig into how two nations with the same starting line took radically dif...

As Ireland square up to the All Blacks at the weekend, we are all New Zealand this week, podcasting from the edge of the world, Richie McCaw's old stomping Christchurch, New Zealand. We explore why the world’s richest men are turning NZ's quiet and beautiful South Island into their apocalypse insurance policy. Peter Thiel has bought hundreds of acres near Lake Wānaka, joining a wave of tech b...

Somewhere between a biker bar in Nimbin and a data centre in Virginia, we try to make sense of the biggest capital boom in history. The AI revolution has garnered $400 billion of spending this year alone, nearly half of all US growth. What if it’s all built on industrial lettuces, tech that expires faster than it earns? From NVIDIA’s chip race to Meta’s debt-fuelled data farms, the same story keep...

Deep in an Australian rainforest, surrounded by birds older than any cathedral, We unpack one of the greatest mysteries in human history, how the first people to sail across open seas, 60,000 years ago, became a civilisation that forgot how to sail. The Aboriginal Australians, the oldest continuous culture on Earth, arrived when Europe was still under ice. They built languages older than Latin, ma...