There are exciting times ahead
We hoped for a Leave vote, and we are thrilled to have it, says Merryn Somerset Webb. There are exciting times ahead.
One of the press releases I got this week on the Brexit vote accused the UK of "democratic hooliganism." Of engineering a situation that has crashed our own currency and stock markets; put the entire EU at risk; and shattered the stability of our own political system. I don't buy it. As John Stepek explains, the stockmarket hasn't crashed: no more was "wiped off" stocks yesterday than was "wiped on" last week when markets decided that the UK was going to vote Remain. There is no crisis here.
Still that doesn't mean things haven't changed. Of course they have. On Thursday, it looked as though we had many, many years of bickering with the EU about their endless failure to reform in a way that suits us ahead. Today we just have two to four years of boring negotiations ahead. How will they end? That we can't know for the simple reason that we don't know who will be running them. Our prime minister has resigned. His replacement may well want to be sure he has a proper mandate to negotiate on our behalf. So he may well want to call a general election to get it. That means that right now we don't know who our new leader will be or which party he will be leading. Both things will make a difference.
The good news is that this week's Brexit comes with almost endless possibility and opportunity. I look at the kind of deal we might come to with the EU (as all the politicians I have spoken to today agree, "anything is possible"). Matthew Partridge looks at how we find out who our new boss is to be. And John looks at what more loose monetary policy might do for your portfolio and at some of the things you might want to buy to make the most of it. The value of an equity isn't based on the profits it might make over one year or two years but over those it will make over many years. An equity is a long duration investment. Something to remember when all those around you are losing their heads.
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We have written an awful lot about the EU referendum over the last year. We hoped for a Leave vote. And we are thrilled to have it. There are exciting times ahead. There'll be more on all this in the full magazine next week but we hope you enjoy this shorter referendum special.
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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.
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