The state sponsored theft you just can’t escape

If you’re reasonably well off, no matter how well you invest, there is nothing you can do to prevent the state relieving you of a large percentage of your wealth, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

I spoke to a friend in his seventies a few weeks ago who told me that he was frightened to pass too much of his wealth on to his children. Why? Because with inflation at 3-4% and likely to keep rising from here, he was worried that his investments were likely to lose purchasing power and that he would need a much larger nominal sum to keep going than he had hoped.

He's right to be worried. Our inflation problem hasn't gone away. You can argue forever about whether quantitative easing (QE) causes domestic inflation or not, but what is absolutely clear is that it pushes down the value of sterling and so imports inflation: every time Mervyn King opens his mouth to talk down the pound the price of everything you buy from abroad goes up again.

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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.