America’s Dutch Disease: How Debt Became the World’s Hottest Export

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.6 • 643 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We’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 insatiable appetite for U.S. Treasuries has turned debt into a commodity tap Washington can turn on at will. We explore how this constant borrowing props up the dollar, guts manufacturing, swells Wall Street, and fuels a political scramble for control of the spigot, with eerie parallels to Ireland’s own multinational tax windfall. Along the way, we ask why old economic theories can’t explain the dollar’s resilience, why quality of spending matters more than quantity, and what history says about how this all might end.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Mac, just before we start, I was on Amazon looking for a little beach read, you know,
0:06.5	and lo and behold, look what I see.
0:10.1	David McWilliams, money, a story of humanity at number one, beating the likes of J.D. Vance
0:17.0	and his hillbilly elegy and Ezra Klein.
0:20.1	Dave McWilliams, number one, boom.
0:22.4	This is the economics version of Top of the Pops.
0:25.5	You can have a whole lot of love soundtrack in the back.
0:29.0	But yes, no, you're right.
0:29.9	It's great to see that money is number one in the Amazon bestsellers in the UK
0:37.3	under the area of economic history, which is fantastic.
0:42.4	Again, thank you so much listeners for supporting the book, for buying the book, for buying the
0:47.2	audiobook. It's really great to see. And it is kind of nice to be number one ahead of the likes
0:53.0	of J.D. Vance and even Ezra Klein,
0:55.8	who I respect in New York Times, but who comes with a massive, massive audience.
1:00.1	So again, thank you very much.
1:02.2	And if you haven't bought your summer, read if in August you're heading off now to the beach,
1:06.6	you're thinking, what should I grab?
1:08.6	What should I read?
1:09.8	Grab money, a story of humanity. You will not
1:12.8	be disappointed, and that is from an unbiased reviewer, the fellow who wrote the bloody thing.
1:21.4	Hey, it's Adam Grant from Worklife, a podcast from TED. This episode is brought to you by FreshWorks.
1:27.8	Freshworks believes the complexity is the enemy of efficiency, so stop wrestling with bloated
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 4 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from David McWilliams, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of David McWilliams and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.