How worried should we be about the recent market falls?

Most media pundits have taken a relaxed attitude to the recent market falls, says Merryn Somerset Webb. They could not be more wrong.

In the two weeks I have just been away with no phone signal and no Wi-Fi I can honestly say that I didn't think about the stockmarket once. Not once. However, you won't be surprised to hear that I have been thinking about it pretty much non-stop since my flight from Lerwick landed and I saw the Sunday papers.

To me it looked immediately as if the last fortnight has been one of the more dramatic of the last seven years one that has laid bare some of the fallacies of the great global recovery and stockmarket boom. But that's not how everyone sees it.

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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.