When the oil runs out, go nuclear

While we worry about where the oil price is headed next, we lose sight of another issue: what are we going to do when it runs out? As far as Merryn Somerset Webb is concerned, there is only one viable alternative.

I think I have got to the bottom of why City salaries are so high: it's because of the regular humiliation the recipients of the cash have to put up with.

Consider the fate of Britain's economists last week. Reuters asked 50 of them whether they thought the Bank of England's monetary policy committee would raise interest rates. All but one said it wouldn't. It promptly 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.