David McWilliams (born 1966) is an Irish economist, writer, and journalist. Since 1999, he has been a broadcaster, writer, economic commentator and documentary-maker. He has written five books, The Pope's Children , The Generation Game, Follow the Money, The Good Room and Renaissance Nation, and written regular columns for the Irish Times and Irish Independent.
McWilliams has a reputation for explaining economic ideas with memorable phrases or stock characters, most famously "breakfast roll man".
Life and career
Early and private life
McWilliams was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1966 and was raised in Windsor Park, Monkstown, Dublin. His father, of Scottish descent, worked in a chemical and paint factory. His Cork-born mother was a teacher. He is married to Sian Smyth, a former corporate lawyer, who is from near Belfast. They live in Dublin.
Education
McWilliams attended Blackrock College in Dublin. He then graduated from Trinity College Dublin, with a degree in economics (1988). His Masters in economics is from the College of Europe, Belgium (1989).
Early Career: 1990s
Between 1990 and 1993 he worked as an economist at the Central Bank of Ireland, a period which covered German reunification, the Maastricht Treaty, Bertie Ahern's term as Minister for Finance and Black Wednesday. Watching these phenomena unfold from the perspective of a Central Bank official shaped his opinions, and these events would be revisited in his writings, especially the triangular relationship between access to credit in Ireland, the retirement funds of an ageing German workforce, and European monetary policy.
Move to London: Early Warnings About Celtic Tiger
McWilliams moved to London to work at UBS as a senior European economist and head of Emerging Markets research for Banque Nationale de Paris. He was one of the economists at the time credited with coining or popularising the phrase "Celtic Tiger" in an analysis that compared the Republic of Ireland to the Tiger economies of Asia, predicting threefold growth per annum in the Irish market in the years 1995–2000. He credited what he described as "an economic miracle" to spending cuts by Charles Haughey's 1987 government, "which laid the foundations for the impressive growth in the 1990s".
During this time he was identified as an outlier among economists interested in Ireland in warning that the housing market in the Republic was running a price bubble similar to that of the housing markets in Boston in the 1980s and Thailand in the early 1990s. In 1996 he predicted a recession by 2005, noting that EMU meant that Ireland would enjoy low interest rates tailored to European neighbours with far lower economic growth than Ireland. In 1998 he specified that in the event of a world recession, Irish house prices would drop by 20%. and predicted a crash by the year 2000. While the Irish Independent described him as "alarmist" in relation to these comments in 1998, the same article also added that mainstream Irish economists who disagreed with him were overly complacent.
From 1999 to 2002, he was an emerging markets strategist with a New York-based hedge fund, Rockwest Capital.
In 2000 – the year he had previously predicted that the Celtic Tiger would end - he warned of a "Hong Kong style property market collapse" in the not too distant future, noting that Ireland was experiencing labour shortages, rising asset prices and high borrowing (five times the then European rate and four times the then US rate). Brendan Keenan of the Irish Independent described him as "the best known critic of the Irish economy" at the time. During 2001 Ireland experienced a foot and mouth outbreak which had an impact on the economy, with some commentators declaring the Celtic Tiger to be dead. However, when the impact to the economy turned out to be less negative than anticipated, his critics dismissed his analysis of the fragile Irish economy as alarmist.
2000s: Writing and Broadcasting
Since returning to work in Ireland, he presented a current affairs programme called Agenda on TV3, a breakfast radio show on NewsTalk 106 from 2002 to 2004 and a topical afternoon discussion programme called The Big Bite on the television station RTÉ One. All these shows were cancelled after relatively short runs. However, in 2005 McWilliams published his first book, The Pope's Children, which became a significant bestseller and firmly established his place as a household name in Ireland, well known enough to be referenced in the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books and imitated on the satire TV show Irish Pictorial Weekly.
