The David McWilliams Podcast

After two episodes on how Ireland’s housing market became so brittle, we get to the only question that matters: how do you actually fix it? In this final part of our housing series with Ronan Lyons, we move from diagnosis to prescription. If the crisis was built over decades through bad incentives, bad planning, weak population forecasting, and a deep bias against density, what would it take to reverse it? We talk about viability, ...

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 packa...

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 S...