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 complicated by so many. I’ve always thought what is complicated is rarely important and what is important is rarely complicated. That will be our motto. Every week we are going to tease out some big economic or political issue facing us, not just ...
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Could the GAA Solve Ireland’s Housing Crisis?
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34:57What if the solution to Ireland’s housing crisis has been sitting on our doorstep all along? We dive into the Danish model of cooperative housing, where 7% of Danes live in co-ops, and a full third of Copenhageners do too, and explore how the GAA, with its 2,200 clubs and pristine community pitches in every village, could spearhead something simila…
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Deepfakes, Big Tech, and the Coming AI Crash?
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37:47AI investment is exploding: the “Magnificent Seven” of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, and NVIDIA, are ploughing almost 7% of US GDP into AI and data centres. That’s the same scale as the US housing boom in 2006, and greater than the dot-com bubble at its peak. Today, just seven firms make up 34% of the S&P 500, the highest concentra…
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France on the Brink: Debt, Drama, and a Possible Sixth Republic
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39:05Broadcast from Île de Ré, we dive into France’s mounting fiscal mess and political paralysis. With Macron a lame-duck, bond markets charging Paris more than Athens, and a nationwide strike looming, we ask: could Europe’s cornerstone become its weakest link? We unpack France’s towering state-and-semi-state debts, why Japan can print and Paris can’t,…
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Economics in a Tent: Live at Electric Picnic 2025
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46:27We took economics to a music festival, and somehow packed the tent. In this Electric Picnic highlights episode from Mindfield, we rock up bleary-eyed and buzzing, then dive straight into the big stuff: what Trump’s assault on America’s institutions means for money, markets, and the rest of us. We map the new super-cycle from post-war social democra…
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Is America The Richest Third World Country?
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40:49Is the US drifting into Peronism? We trace the playbook, tariffs and import substitution, national champions, censorship-by-intimidation, and a war on independent institutions, and map it onto Trump’s America: sacking a Fed governor, menacing J-Powell, firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, deploying the National Guard, and the Treasury…
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Germany, 10 Years After “Wir Schaffen Das”, What Really Happened? with Katja Hoyer
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36:52Ten years ago, Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to more than 1.1 million asylum seekers in a single year with the words “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”). Today, Germany has over 3.4 million asylum seekers, about 4% of its population, and politics, society, and culture have been transformed. In this episode, we dive into what really happene…
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The Nationalisation of the New Home Market
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33:56The state has quietly become the biggest buyer of new homes. In fact, builders like Cairn Homes now have forward sales of nearly €946 million, much of it locked in by government deals. That means up to 80–85% of new builds are being bought by the state, at an average price of €382,000 per unit, while wages lag far behind rising house prices, which …
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Ukraine at the Crossroads: From Donetsk to the Garrison State
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41:14After nearly 11 years of war, Putin’s maximalist demands have shrunk to a sliver of land in Donetsk, a pyrrhic victory after countless lives lost and millions displaced. But while the Kremlin clings to a symbolic scrap of territory, we explore whether Ukraine’s true future lies not in NATO membership but in becoming what political economist Harold …
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Ireland is a Hostage to Fortune
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38:47Have we caught a case of Dutch Disease? Ireland’s dependence on foreign multinationals looks less like a golden goose and more like Japanese knotweed, invasive, overwhelming, and slowly strangling everything around it. Yes, the jobs are plentiful and the tax coffers are bulging, but the hidden costs are piling up: small businesses being elbowed out…
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America’s Dutch Disease: How Debt Became the World’s Hottest Export
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40:09We’ve always known Dutch Disease as what happens when a country strikes oil or gas and accidentally hollows out the rest of its economy. But what if the United States’ great “resource discovery” wasn’t energy, it was debt? This week we talk to Brendan Greeley about his brilliant framework for understanding America’s political economy: the world’s i…
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From The Godfather to the Blockchain: How Easy Money Seduced Wall Street (and the White House)
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26:46We’ve always said to understand the economy, you have to understand human nature, and nothing reveals that better than watching the biggest players do a Godfather-style U-turn for easy money. In this episode, we connect the dots between Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone and Jamie Dimon’s pivot from calling crypto “a fraud” to using it as loan collateral…
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Japan: Lost in Translation Part Two
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41:13We all love a boom story, until it turns into a 40‑year hangover. In 1995, Japan’s nominal GDP hit its high‑water mark. It took until the 2020s to get back there. Debt has exploded to 250% of GDP. The population is shrinking so fast that by 2070, one in three Japanese will have vanished, down from 128 million in 2010 to just 87 million. What went w…
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Japan: From Feudal Isolation to Economic Superpower
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43:12This week marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we’re taking a deep dive into Japan’s extraordinary economic story. In part one of our two-part series, we explore how Japan went from a feudal, isolated society to one of the most powerful economies in the world. With our guest Russell Jones, a brilliant economist an…
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