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History is littered with financial crises, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But for all that, ours is still more than a cause for concern. So what is she buying now?

I wrote here last week that the economists of the West need to start being a little less self-centred. Their prevailing view still seems to be that this is the "worst financial crisis ever", when in fact it is nothing of the sort. It isn't very nice, but it's just a repetition of the usual cycle of financial history.

A reminder of this came from a reader who sent me a link to an article from The New York Times about a medieval credit crunch. The bankers of our own King Edward I relied on early forms of wholesale financial markets to keep the king in cash.

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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.