The real threat to our global economic and political order

Economics and history didn’t end with the fall of communism after all. TS Lombard’s Charles Dumas tells Merryn Somerset Webb where they’re going next.

919-Berlin-Wall-634

Everything seemed so simple after the Berlin wall fell

Twenty five years ago, it was perfectly standard to think that the multi-millennium struggle to work out how best to run society had come to an end witness The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, published in 1992 . The collapse of communism left the US as the world's sole super power and, as Charles Dumas says in his book Populism and Economics, appeared to make it clear that "a blend of capitalism and democracy" was the ideal political and social system. Globalisation a fast rise in the free flow of goods, capital and people around the world followed, as did a stunning hi-tech revolution, and for a time all seemed 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.