David McWilliams Keynote Speaker

David McWilliams has been ranked the 10th most influential economist in the world and as such is a regular on the international speaking circuit. He is Adjunct Professor of Global Economics at Trinity College Dublin. In Ireland he is known as the first economist to identify the Irish boom as nothing more than a credit bubble, warning of its collapse and the consequences for the country. Internationally, he has a reputation as a brilliant public speaker.  Consistently accurate in his forecasts, David McWilliams was the only economist in Ireland who accurately forecast a strong UK Brexit vote, the Trump victory and the 2008 global crash.

David brings economics to life and makes it relevant and understandable to the widest audiences. He is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, is a regular contributor to Google’s famed Zeitgeist conference and has been named Ireland’s most influential Twitter user. With the objective to make economics easily digestible and fun, McWilliams draws on his unique sense of humour when he travels the globe speaking on trends in growth, currencies, financial markets and geo-politics.

David has written six books, presented award-winning documentaries and has even brought economics to the stage, at Ireland’s Abbey Theatre.

He is very active on social media and the third most widely followed economist in the world with 238,000 Twitter followers. He writes a weekly economics column for The Irish Times and is a regular international contributor to the Financial Times.

He is the co-founder of the world’s only economics festival ‘Kilkenomics‘, an eclectic combination of economics and stand-up comedy, described by The Financial Times as “The best economics conference in the world” and maybe more accurately by The Australian as “Davos without the hookers”.   This unique festival has attracted number of globally known speakers including Paul Krugman, Nassim Taleb, Samantha Power and Martin Wolf.

David has an online economics course – “Economics without Boundaries” and his series of animated economics videos – ‘Punk Economics’ – have been viewed by over 2,500,000 people so far.  He has a weekly podcast where he interviews a variety of notable names, both local and international.

Once upon a time he had a real job working as an economist first in the Irish Central Bank and later as Chief European Economist at UBS and Head of Emerging Markets Research at Banque Nationale de Paris. He studied economics at Trinity College Dublin and the College of Europe in Bruges.