Put an ingot under the tree

I have a wonderful book, published in 1977 and left by an Arabist great uncle. It is called Oil Sheiks: Inside The Supercharged World Of The Petrodollar, by Linda Blandford, and traces the path of the money that poured into the Middle East and out again during the last oil boom.

I have a wonderful book, published in 1977 and left by an Arabist great uncle. It is called Oil Sheiks: Inside The Supercharged World Of The Petrodollar, by Linda Blandford, and traces the path of the money that poured into the Middle East and out again during the last oil boom.

It starts with the story of a chauffeur who spent two months one summer in the early 1970s driving a Saudi Arabian prince around in his "brand new Rolls-Royce Corniche". On the day the prince left London, his chauffeur drove him to the airport, checked him in and asked him what to do with the car. "Keep it," was the answer. To the prince, this was "a gesture in keeping with his culture", wrote Blandford, but "to the gaping airline staff it merely confirmed the image of Arabs as idiots with too much money", as did their apparently utterly price-insensitive purchases of central London property and baubles in the likes of Asprey and Tiffany.

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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.