The man with gold in his pockets and silver by his bed

Merryn Somerset Webb is shocked to find herself wrapped in the warm blanket of a consensus when she meets Robin Angus, executive director of the well-liked, solid and market-beating Personal Assets Trust.

silver and gold
(Image credit: © 2011 Bloomberg Finance LP)

Robin Angus is a man after my own heart. He carries gold coins in his pockets, has a silver ingot beside his bed, and would wear emeralds on every finger if his wife would let him. Better still, he thinks deflation should be allowed to do its job rebalancing the economy but expects inflation to let rip instead. He would invest all his money in high-yielding defensives and gold, given half a chance, and he thinks the housing market is bound to fall by quite a lot quite soon.

Sound familiar? If you are a regular reader, it surely will. This is comforting stuff. In a world where almost everything is up in the air and where I practically never get to bask in the warm blanket of a consensus, spending an entire hour chatting with someone with whom I am in almost complete agreement is really quite something. So much so that I could hardly drag myself away at the end of our talk. The very idea of exchanging my comfy leather armchair in the Georgian townhouse offices of the Personal Assets Trust for a drafty restaurant table and an argument about commercial property prices (my next appointment) was almost more than I could bear. That's why this week's interview is rather longer than usual. My apologies.

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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.