The biggest scam of all: Governments saving us from the bust

Never mind dodgy hedge funds swindling billions out of investors, Governments are doing the same to taxpayers. But all their misguided efforts at 'fiscal stimulus' will be in vain, says John Stepek. In fact, they may even make things worse.

The world's becoming a riskier place.

For a while there, it seemed that risk had been abolished. All through the boom, we still had terrorism, and we still had wars but they didn't seem that important. They were sideshows, niggling little inconveniences in an otherwise near-perfect world.

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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.