Is AI About to Crash the Global Economy?

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.6 • 701 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

History says yes. We rewind to 1873, when a stock market wobble in Vienna triggered a global railway crash that took down banks, empires and 80% of world lending in a matter of months, and ask whether we're staring straight at a rerun. AI spending is now bigger than the entire US defence budget, the same handful of companies are quietly funding each other in a circle, and China is quietly open-sourcing the whole thing to undercut Silicon Valley. If it pops, it'll pop between now and October.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's podcast is all about the AI boom.
0:03.1	Is it a boom or is it a bubble?
0:04.7	We go back in history to 1873 to a massive railway investment linked collapse in the American
0:12.5	stock markets.
0:13.3	We say, is that going to happen again?
0:15.5	It's AI, it's America, it's a bit of history, and it's lots of futurology.
0:20.4	It's all coming up in a couple of
0:22.3	minutes. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered
0:32.9	by ACAST. are you doing there?
0:39.5	How is your midsummer ahead? Are you still baking away in Barmy, Dublin, Cork, Galway, Belfast, Limerick, Waterford,
0:46.1	wherever you happen to be today.
0:48.8	Today's podcast is all going to be about the risk in the United States of a significant turnabout of events
0:57.3	due to the overinvestment of the Americans in AI technology, which promises to change the
1:04.4	future, but has yet to deliver any real returns for the people who put their money in.
1:10.3	The question is, can AI deliver before the companies that borrowed huge amounts
1:16.8	in order to build the AI infrastructure need to pay that money back?
1:21.7	We're going to look at history.
1:22.8	We're going to look at the future.
1:24.1	Going to look at the present.
1:25.5	And we're going to make a little connection
1:28.5	with Ireland because you'll have seen that in the last couple of days, Intel has announced
1:34.2	a big increase in its investment. They're looking for tech bros, etc. in and tech professionals
	...

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