Afleveringen
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Alan Greenspan just died at 100, and he might be the most consequential person of the last 30 years that nobody talks about. We unpack the wild story of the jazz clarinettist turned Fed chairman, the Ayn Rand cult he came from, the "Greenspan Put" that quietly rigged Wall Street, and why his fingerprints are all over Ireland's 2008 crash. Plus a strange historical twist: was Alan Greenspan related to the Jewish teenager whose shooting triggered Kristallnacht?
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The country of the future has been stuck in the future for 100 years. We dig into Brazil's wild economic story; slavery, the secret "whitening" immigration policy that sent millions of Italians south, and why Brazilian football carries the weight of a whole nation's identity.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Europe just got overtaken, and it knows it. From a bar in Brussels, we unpack the ancient fault line tearing the EU apart, why China's rise has spooked the continent more than anyone admits, and why the "European way of life" might already be slipping away.
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Haiti just qualified for its first World Cup in 50 years, and they come from the poorest country in the Americas, a place where gangs run the capital and the average person earns $45 a month. We trace how the world's first successful slave revolution ended up here: French gunboats, a 120-year debt, ecological collapse, and an island where one half (the Dominican Republic) is racing ahead while the other is forgotten.
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Mark Carney is being hailed as the new leader of the free world. While he's facing down Trump abroad, his real headache is at home, Alberta, Canada's Texas, is gearing up for a referendum that could split the country in two.
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We head down Mexico way to unpack the country hosting the World Cup, a $1.8 trillion economy living side by side with one of the most powerful criminal networks on earth. Drugs, guns, avocados, and the politics tying Trump and Sheinbaum together whether they like it or not.
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The FT's Simon Kuper joins us to kick off our World Cup series, on why tiny social democracies keep producing the best football teams, why FIFA is laundering reputations for dictators, and why this tournament will say more about geopolitics than any leaders' summit this year.
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Forget oil. The real fight is over the world's most precious and least understood commodity; water. We're joined by Paul O'Callaghan of BlueTech Research to explain why two billion people still can't get safe drinking water, why Saudi Arabia is quietly draining Colorado, and why Ireland's biggest strategic advantage might just be the rain we love to complain about.
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Made in Kinsale, sold in America, the Ozempic boom is making Ireland rich and dangerously exposed. We unpack how three companies now pay nearly half our corporate tax, and what happens when Trump finally notices.
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Monetary historian Brendan Greeley explains why the dollar's power has nothing to do with the Fed, why crypto is just a bank in disguise, and why politicising the dollar might be the fastest way to end its reign as the world's reserve currency.
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Birth rates are collapsing, not just in rich countries, but everywhere from Mexico to Tunisia. The FT's John Burn-Murdoch joins us to unpack the surprising culprit, why young people aren't just having fewer kids, they're not even coupling up, and what it means for the future of work, wealth,
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Britain is running out of money, in a currency it prints itself. We unpack the gilt market panic, Starmer's impossible bind, and why the UK is starting to look more like 1970s Italy than the country that invented modern finance.
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No policy. No plan. No housing. Sinead O'Sullivan is back to explain why Ireland took in more immigrants per head than any country in Europe, and why the middle class is about to feel what the working class has been shouting about for years.
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China is winning, and Trump doesn't know it yet. As the two leaders sit down in Beijing today, we explain why the Chinese think America is an empire in decline, and why they might be right.
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What happens when a country produces more graduates than it has elite jobs to give them? According to Peter Turchin, the Russian-American thinker behind End Times, that's exactly the moment civilisations start to crack. This week, we get into his theory of "elite overproduction" and ask whether Ireland is staring straight into it. We unpack the stats: most educated population in the EU, master's degrees doubling in 15 years, and nearly one in three graduates working in jobs that don't need a degree. We talk about why the barista with a first-class honours and the barman with an economics master's are not just funny anecdotes, they're leading indicators of political instability. We look at how the public sector is quietly absorbing the overflow that the private sector can't, why AI is about to pour petrol on the fire, and why historically it's not the abject poor who revolt, it's the relatively rich and bitterly disappointed.
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The UAE has just walked out of OPEC after nearly 60 years, and the timing is no accident. This week, we head to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to ask what's really going on. Why now? Why leave the cartel in the middle of a war? What does it mean for the price of petrol in your car, for Trump's midterms, and for the geopolitics of the Gulf? We get into the strange tacit alliance between the UAE and Israel, why Iran's real leverage isn't the Straits of Hormuz but the Emirates themselves, and how Saudi Arabia's old swing-producer power is being quietly dismantled. We also draw a much bigger lesson for small countries everywhere, including Ireland: the multilateral world that small states have hidden inside since the 1940s is breaking down, and the UAE's gamble is a glimpse of the hard choices that lie ahead. Oil, war, money, and the end of an era, all in one episode.
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This week, Sinead O'Sullivan is back, and she's got an answer that official Ireland really doesn't want to hear. We dig into the "failure premium", the staggering cost of a state that knows how to hand out subsidies but has forgotten how to coordinate, build, or own anything. We follow the money: why HAP quietly inflates the rent into the landlord's pocket, why housing a refugee costs €99 a night here and €13 in the Netherlands, and why we're paying premium prices for second-rate outcomes across housing, health, and infrastructure. We look at how a country adapts to dysfunction, sheds in back gardens, hollowed-out city centres, kids emigrating, until we stop noticing it's not normal. What happens when the multinational money slows down and we're left holding the infrastructure deficit we never fixed?
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Ireland is now officially the worst country in Europe for young entrepreneurs. Just 5.1% of our 20-somethings are building their own businesses, less than half the rate in Slovakia. So what the hell happened? This week, we ask why young Irish people have stopped backing themselves, and why a country that looks rich on paper is quietly losing the very people who make economies dance. We get into the difference between wealth that's extracted (the multinationals) and wealth that's created (the Ryanairs), and why one is far more fragile than it looks. We bring in Schumpeter and Nassim Taleb, follow a hypothetical 27-year-old called Kiera as the numbers crush her before she's even begun, and ask whether Ireland has become a nation of doubters, quietly punishing anyone who dares to have a go. We float a fix: stop parking the multinational windfall in a pension fund our 25-year-olds will never see, and turn it into a startup fund they can actually use. Because without risk-takers, there's no return, and without return, there's no economy.
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The global economy runs on one thing: the US dollar. What happens when trust in that system starts to crack? In this episode, we go deep into the mechanics of global finance, from dollar “swap lines” to shadow banking, to explain how the United States became the financial centre of the world, and why that dominance may now be under threat. At the heart of it all is a simple but unsettling reality: America doesn’t just produce goods, it produces money. The rest of the world needs dollars to trade, invest, and survive financial shocks. That gives the US enormous power, but also creates dangerous imbalances. We explore how decades of financialisation have concentrated wealth and influence in a small group of investors, reshaping both the American economy and global politics. Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions, particularly around Iran, raise a bigger question: could a single strategic misstep do to the US what the Suez Crisis did to Britain, quietly ending its era of dominance?
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Ireland is one of the richest countries in Europe, so why does it feel like it isn’t? We sit down with economist and engineer Sinead O'Sullivan to unpack a deceptively simple but deeply uncomfortable idea: Ireland is a premature state. Despite extraordinary wealth on paper, everyday life tells a different story. Housing is broken, infrastructure lags behind, public services struggle to deliver. So where is all the money going? The answer, as Sinead argues, is structural. Ireland has become exceptionally good at spending money, but never properly learned how to build systems. For centuries, key functions of the state were outsourced, first to the British Empire, then the Church, then the EU, and now multinational corporations. The result is a country rich in resources, but lacking the institutional muscle to turn that wealth into a functioning society. We also take on the reaction to this kind of thinking; the “nitpickers” who focus on minor details to avoid confronting big, uncomfortable truths. If Ireland’s problem isn’t money, but capacity, then the implications are far more serious than any short-term fix.
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