David McWilliams (born 1966) is an Irish economist, writer, and journalist. McWilliams initially worked as an economist with the Central Bank of Ireland, UBS bank and the Banque Nationale de Paris. Since 1999, he has been a broadcaster, writer, economic commentator and documentary-maker. He has written five books, The Pope's Children , The Generation Game, Follow the Money, The Good Room and Renaissance Nation, and written regular columns for the Irish Times and Irish Independent. McWilliams has a reputation for explaining economic ideas with memorable phrases or stock characters, most famously "breakfast roll man". Life and career Early and private life McWilliams was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1966 and was raised in Windsor Park, Monkstown, Dublin. His father, of Scottish descent, worked in a chemical and paint factory. His Cork-born mother was a teacher. He is married to Sian Smyth, a former corporate lawyer, who is from near Belfast. They live in Dublin. Education McWilliams attended Blackrock College in Dublin. He then graduated from Trinity College Dublin, with a degree in economics (1988). His Masters in economics is from the College of Europe, Belgium (1989). Early Career: 1990s Between 1990 and 1993 he worked as an economist at the Central Bank of Ireland, a period which covered German reunification, the Maastricht Treaty, Bertie Ahern's term as Minister for Finance and Black Wednesday. Watching these phenomena unfold from the perspective of a Central Bank official shaped his opinions, and these events would be revisited in his writings, especially the triangular relationship between access to credit in Ireland, the retirement funds of an ageing German workforce, and European monetary policy. Move to London: Early Warnings About Celtic Tiger McWilliams moved to London to work at UBS as a senior European economist and head of Emerging Markets research for Banque Nationale de Paris. He is credited as, at this time, coining the phrase "Celtic Tiger" in an analysis that compared the Republic of Ireland to the Tiger economies of Asia, predicting threefold growth per annum in the Irish market in the years 1995–2000. He credited what he described as "an economic miracle" to spending cuts by Charles Haughey's 1987 government, "which laid the foundations for the impressive growth in the 1990s". During this time he was identified as an outlier among economists interested in Ireland in warning that the housing market in the Republic was running a price bubble similar to that