Warning to employees: the value of your employer can fall as well as rise

If we are to make employee share ownership more widely available – as we should – we have to educate workers on how equity markets behave, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

181008-royal-mail

Royal Mail employees are not quite as financially sorted as they thought they would be
(Image credit: © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP)

Last week I wrote about the generally accepted benefits of employee ownership schemes in the wake of Labour's apparent plans to confiscate 10% of all listed companies with more than 250 employees and redistribute any future income from that 10% to workers and to the state.

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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.