Stock markets are flashing red

Buying shares at today's valuations is quite a vote of confidence in Donald Trump, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Anthony Scaramucci (aka the Mooch) is upset. Earlier this year, having bravely hitched his wagon to Donald Trump as a member of his campaign's economic advisory group in 2016, he was convinced that he was about to be offered a plum job. Assistant to the president perhaps. So he arranged to sell his hedge fund business, Skybridge, to HNA, a Chinese conglomerate, for $275m and waited for his phone call. It didn't come.

Now he is unemployed. He isn't exactly under a financial imperative to panic. But it probably doesn't feel good either. On the plus side, he may have got out in the nick of time. His funds haven't performed particularly well over the last few years, says Vanity Fair. And, if you turn to our markets page, you will see that the signs are not good for the US market as a whole. Other hedge-fund managers have been selling out and closing down without needing Trump as a prompt and that could be a hint that the rest of us should do the same.

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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.