Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez and Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, interviewed David McWilliams, economist, author and broadcaster, who most recently wrote Money: A Story of Humanity.

In their wide-ranging conversation, David and Filippo explored the core ideas behind McWilliams’ latest book, Money: A Story of Humanity .

David explained that money is not just a medium of exchange but a “social technology”—a tool humans invented to solve the problems of complexity, scale, and cooperation as societies grew. Rather than focusing on gold standards or physical currency, he argues that money lives entirely in our imagination and is sustained by shared trust.

The real power of money, he told Filippo, lies in finance—the web of obligations and expectations we construct about the future, which allow us to borrow, speculate, and coordinate at scale. A mortgage, he noted, is essentially "selling a future version of yourself to the present".

The conversation turned to policy and crises, with McWilliams stressing that central banks don't truly control money creation—commercial banks do, by lending. He described financial crises as psychological events: collapses in collective trust rather than mechanical failures.

Filippo and David then discuss what might spark the next crisis, and warned that we’re already living in a fragile system—characterised by rising debt, speculative excess, and institutional mistrust; tariffs often signal a country’s loss of confidence, and with the return of Trump looming, global economic volatility may only intensify.

In the end, both Filippo and David agreed: money’s true meaning lies not in algebra or charts, but in the stories we believe and the behaviours we share.

David McWilliams is an economist, author, journalist, documentary-maker and broadcaster. He is Adjunct Professor of Global Economics at the School of Business Trinity College Dublin. He produces a weekly economics podcast which has repeatedly topped the Irish and English podcast charts.

David is co-founder of the world’s only economics and stand-up comedy festival Kilkenomics – described by the FT as “simply, the best economics conference in the world”. David has written six bestsellers, The Pope's Children , The Generation Game, Follow the Money, The Good Room, Renaissance Nation, and Money: A Story of Humanity, and one of these The Pope’s Children is the best selling nonfiction ever published in Ireland.

David was an economist in the International Relations Department of the Irish Central Bank; Chief European Economist at UBS, Europe’s largest bank; and Head of Emerging Markets Research at Banque Nationale de Paris.