The end of Britain

While there's been plenty of cause to be optimistic with your portfolio, the dire state of Britain's finances could be about to spoil the party, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

One of the problems with knowing a lot of people in the City is that you end up with an irritatingly large number of friends who, while not being much older than you, are very successful, very rich and, to add insult to injury, retired.

I recently had lunch with one of them. He is a generally optimistic man and likes to berate me for my pessimism. Which he did.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.