Boom during bust for McWilliams as firm enjoys record profits

Celebrity economist David McWilliams is enjoying a personal boom during the bust, with his main firm enjoying record profits last year.

New accounts filed by the bestselling author and broadcaster’s Iconic Media Ltd confirm that it enjoyed profits of €211,031 in the 12 months to the end of Mar 31 last year.

The figures lodged with the Companies Office show that the firm’s accumulated profits jumped from €392,321 to €603,352 last year. This compares to profits of just €15,580 in the 12 months to the end of Mar 2011, when accumulated profits rose from €376,741 to €392,321.

McWilliams’s firm is sitting on financial assets totalling €1.26m. It was incorporated in 1999 and McWilliams’s wife, Sian Smyth, serves as a director on the firm.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and a former economist at the Central Bank, McWilliams came to public prominence after his repeated warnings over the housing bubble.

McWilliams’s first book, The Pope’s Children, explored his concerns and was the bestselling non-fiction book in 2006 and gave us the terms “Breakfast Roll Man” and “Trackerville”.

He followed it with The Generation Game in 2007, with Follow The Money completing the trilogy in 2009. McWilliams’s latest work, The Good Room, was published last year.

He has also presented a number of TV series about the country’s economic challenges, while he also wrote and presented a documentary, Addicted to Money, for ABC Australia which aired on four continents.

More recently, he has been generating income through public speaking engagements staged by the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Google, Sony, and the City of Sydney, among others.