Why gold is the ultimate insurance

No matter how safe you think the world is now, the things that have always gone wrong in the past will almost certainly go wrong again. The only sensible insurance is gold, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Mostly, when you buy insurance, you hope it won't ever turn out to be necessary. You pay annual premiums for your car insurance, but that doesn't mean you secretly hope someone will knock you off the M25; you pay a fortune to insure your house, but that doesn't mean you want it to be burnt to the ground during your summer holidays (mostly).

The same goes for gold. When I started buying it back in 2002 or so, I did so largely because the supply and demand balance seemed out of whack. But as the decade wore on, I began to see my holdings much more as an insurance against pretty much all the things that have always gone wrong in the past and that will almost definitely do so at some point in the future.

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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.