Printing money is the only thing keeping the UK and US afloat

Don't be fooled - the UK and US are in just as big a mess as Europe. The difference is we can print our way out of it, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

I've been reading up on Scottish history in advance of the independence debate heating up. The must-have book on the events in advance of the Act of Union that brought Scotland and England together in 1707 is Douglas Watt's The Price of Scotland.

It's a fantastic run-through of the "catastrophic failure" of the Darien scheme the creation of the Company of Scotland to establish a Central American colony. This failure (a result of horrible financial mismanagement and shockingly bad strategy) and the huge financial losses that came with it, made Darien what Watt calls a "central ingredient" in the eventual marriage of convenience between the two countries. "The Price of Scotland" refers to the huge sum of money transferred from England to Scotland on union, the majority of which went to pay back the losses of the original investors in the Company of Scotland. I suspect we'll be returning to this one here another day.

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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.