Cutting the cost of saving

Investors have long waited for politicians to cut the cost of saving, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Now the market is doing that itself.

There is something of a consensus in the press that the Labour manifesto has opened up "clear blue water" between the Labour and Conservative parties. The UK voter, says absolutely everyone, has a real choice to make here. That's true but only, I suspect, to a degree. Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto is interventionist, extremely expensive and a bit silly. But you could say that of almost all manifestos. And the truth is that over the last few months all UK politics has shifted firmly towards interventionism.

Corbyn clearly doesn't trust the market: he would like to nationalise everything in sight. But Theresa May doesn't trust it much either: she often says that she is prepared to step in when the market "isn't working" her plan to cap utility bills shows that she is no less prepared to force state control on industries than her rival. They've identified similar villains in the last few months as well.

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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.