You need to invest in companies you can trust: here’s how

These days, too many companies are run for the benefit and enrichment of their managers, not their owners. As an investor, that's something you want to avoid, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Here, she explains how.

CLSA's Christopher Wood, writing from Hong Kong, claimed in a note this week to be "gobsmacked" by the "moral frenzy generated by the alleged fixing of the London interbank lending rate (Libor)."

From a distance it all seems rather absurd to him. First, it has surely more often than not made people's borrowing costs lower. "What's the problem with that?" Second, he is bemused by the idea that anyone thinks there is a normal interbank lending rate even now, years after the fixing is supposed to have ended.

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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.