Nobody's talking about the money

This has been a pretty rubbish election campaign all round, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But the most worry thing has been how little the economy has featured.

What did you worry about most during our generally rubbish election campaign? My guess is it wasn't economics. The majority of our political conversation was about social care, nuclear weapons, terrorism prevention and policing. These are all important, but how we deal with them depends on the underlying strength of our economy and it is odd how little this has featured.

We do, after all, have some very serious problems on our hands. We have an unsustainably large national debt. We have a consumer credit bubble. Everything to do with money has been hugely distorted by the behaviour of our uncontrollable central banks. We have super-slow productivity growth. And, while we know that tax is a huge behaviour changer in the UK (anyone in doubt should look to the effect tax-relief changes are having on the buy-to-let market), we have a tax system that everyone agrees is rubbish.

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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.