Unrest will export inflation

The social unrest in the Middle East will no doubt hit the already-high oil price. This, in turn, is going to mean higher inflation for the rest of the world, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

At the start of the year I wrote a list on our blog of the things we should be worried about. It was 14 items long. Number six was social unrest in emerging markets. Rising food prices might irritate consumers in developed countries, I said, but they starve people in many developing countries. And nothing drives revolt quite like fear of hunger.

As ever, it is hard to sort out exactly what the trigger has been for the revolutions in the Middle East, but inflation has had something to do with it. It is bad enough being tyrannised and unemployed without being threatened by hunger too. So what next?

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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.