How money lost its true purpose

Money has lost its power to tell good investments from bad. Central banks think the answer is to print more of the stuff. But we're in this mess because the world is awash with money, says John Stepek. And we won't make things better by flooding it with more.

Hopes that we were embarking on a big Christmas rally took a bit of a pounding yesterday. Stock markets around the world dived.

And little wonder. The National Bureau of Economic Research the US body which officially decides if the country is in recession announced its decision. The US is indeed in recession, and it started in December 2007.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.