Two of the safest places to put your money now

With both recession and inflation well under way, there aren't many places you'd want to put your money at the moment. So Merryn Somerset Webb shares the two investments she'd consider making right now.

It's getting very nasty out there. Most European stock markets have fallen 15% so far this year; the FTSE 100 is down 14%, and the Dow Jones is off 9%. And things are no better in Asia where Hong Kong's Hang Seng is down 14% and the Sensex 13%*.

The plus point to this is that I won't have to listen to many more lectures from City experts about decoupling look at the state of emerging market indices and it is perfectly clear that no one still rates the idiotic notion that these export dependent economies can escape the carnage caused by the bursting of the credit bubble and the arrival of recession in the US.

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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.