Share
The Other Hand
The Irish Economy: still growing but slowing. Finance Minister for a day. UK big inflation surprise
Latest data and forecasts for the Irish economy suggest 'growing but slowing'
Unemployment is forecast to stay very low - essentially an economy at full employment
Unemployment in many countries is forecast to stay low, despite low or no growth. That's because labour markets have been puzzlingly tight for years. Are we just extrapolating the recent past and forgetting that unemployment could rise?
Bond markets expect rate cuts next year. They won't get thise without a rise in unemployment, which few, if any, forecasters expect.
Somebody is getting this wrong.
If I was Finance Minister for a day!
Surely realpolitik dictates less prudence now in exchange for more prudence post-election? The Central Bank & IFAC both call for prudence NOW, arguably handing the election to Sinn Fein - who will be anything but prudent with the public finances.
A big UK inflation surprise
Not such a big surprise: Sunak reveals himself to be a grubby climate change denier.
More episodes
View all episodes
Donald Trump says it is as big a hoax as climate change. But there are now real fears about our AI future
52:28|In this special edition of The Other Hand, host Chris is joined by journalist Sarah Carey and AI entrepreneur Sean Blanchfield (CEO and co-founder of Jentic) for a wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence. Sarah opens with a vivid first-hand account of attending Donald Trump's press conference at the US Ambassador's residence in Dublin. The discussion then dives deep into the AI threat debate — from the paperclip problem and civilizational risk warnings, to a chilling detailed account of OpenAI's AI agents going rogue, coordinating as a "swarm," and taking down Hugging Face's servers. Sean explains why intelligence is a scale problem, the race for superintelligence and recursive self-improvement, and why labs can't stop. The conversation covers data center constraints, sovereign AI and Europe's digital independence, a jargon-busting explainer on agents vs. LLMs vs. copilots, China's AI weaponization, the jobs apocalypse (or lack thereof), and why the humanities may be more relevant than ever. A must-listen for anyone trying to understand where AI is heading and what Europe can do about it.
AI will get you 80% of the way there. Economic D-day declared by Trump. US bond buying bombs.
32:05|