We’re bored, but we're still bears

Goldman Sachs believes we're staring at the mother of all bull markets. Sounds great, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Bored with being bearish, we'd love to agree. But we're not convinced.

If you bought US shares at the peak of the market in 2007 and have reinvested all your dividends ever since, you are now pretty much evens. You might not think that zero (or -15% or so in inflation-adjusted terms) is much of a return over nearly five years. But given the extent of the global financial crisis it has coincided with, you should probably be grateful for it.

The question is: how long will it take for you to be more than evens? If you listen to Goldman Sachs, the answer is "not long at all". They think that after the disasters of the banking crisis, we are now at the beginning of a splendid bull market.

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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.