What has the bubble done for us?

Past bubbles gave us the railway network and fibre-optic connectivity, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But all this bubble has produced is a new set of slums and a sense of financial entitlement among the rich.

Are bubbles always a bad thing? You can argue they're not. If an economy is to take great leaps forward it needs the occasional massive injection of capital. Take the railway bubble in the 1840s. Would a government ever have invested the money needed to crisscross the UK with tracks over 9,500 miles of them? Of course not.

And would private capital have paid for the tracks had its controllers been able realistically to gauge the potential returns (it is estimated that anyone who invested in the 1840s would have had to wait 50-odd years just to get their money back). Of course not.

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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.