We're still living in a bubble

Governments might be able to stop house prices falling in the short term, but they can't support the bubble at the expense of everything else for ever.

When our property experts met at last year's roundtable, they were mostly convinced that property prices would be down significantly by the time they met again. They were mostly wrong.

Instead, once the first round of forced sellers had been disposed of, ultra-low interest rates allowed everyone else to hang on: mortgage payments fell by two thirds in the year to March 2009. Supply collapsed as a result (people preferred to stay put than sell at non-peak prices), so much so that even with the mortgage market more or less frozen, prices started to rise. This week, depending on who you listen to, they are no more than 10% off their late 2007/early 2008 levels.

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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.