Enough about Brexit – it's time to talk about the fat cats

Fund managers may well find their industry being reformed for them, says Merryn Somerset Webb. And they only have themselves to blame.

Crazy month. Sane result. That seems the simplest way to sum up UK politics since the EU referendum. It's looked like chaos. But within a few weeks we have moved from a shock vote for Brexit to a leadership campaign via a period in which person after person, as the wonderful Ruth Davidson put it, was "resigning, getting knifed, bottling it, withdrawing, failing, declaring, or falling on their sword" and on to the coronation of a new prime minister and a perfectly good one at that.

This is the kind of thing that should make our political system the envy of the world because it works. It means, as analyst Russell Napier says, that the UK is capable of "flexing not breaking". The politicians who stretched a million truths in the run-up to the referendum are gone. The overvalued pound that produced our horrible current-account deficit is gone. The cost of our borrowing has fallen with gilt rates, such that we can now dump austerity. Our constitution, exchange rate and political system are all flexing. So far so good.

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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.