Why you should still hold gold

In today's uncertain world, there's no better way to protect your wealth than by holding gold, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Here, she explains why, and reveals what she's buying now.

Back in December I upset a number of regular readers by saying that I was no longer an active buyer of gold. It wasn't quite as dramatic a move as it seemed. I'd been holding it in various forms since 2001 so the huge run up in price meant that my portfolio was beginning to look far too tied to its price.

Gold was also no longer the sure bet it had been a decade earlier. Back in 2001, it was historically cheap relative to everything from the price of oil to the cost of getting it out of the ground. By late 2011 it wasn't. At the same time, while I think of gold as insurance against an inflationary end game, it looked as if we were entering the deflationary stage of our crisis, with the main games in town being recession and deleveraging and the voices against more quantitative easing (QE) in the US and UK getting louder.

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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.