Don't write off emerging markets just yet

A slowing rate of growth in developing economies can sometimes be a bullish signal for investors in emerging-market stocks. Merryn Somerset Webb explains why.

I've talked to a good few interesting people in the past week. But two are of particular interest at the moment. The first is David Stockman, author of The Great Deformation, The Corruption of Capitalism in America a book that has been at the top of the bestseller lists in the US since it came out in April. The second is Dambisa Moyo, the almost impossibly glamorous author of, among other must-reads, How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly, and The Stark Choices Ahead.

Both were and I guess this is obvious deeply pessimistic on the future of the US in particular. While their arguments are far from identical, they are both convinced that America, with its insistence on using monetary policy to mismanage interest rates and distort markets, along with its badly structured welfare state and low prioritisation of education, has a sad future ahead of it. Stockman was once director of the Office of Management and Budget in the US (under Ronald Reagan) and Moyo was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. So it is worth listening to both of them.

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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.