Nothing to cheer about for sterling

The pound is a basket case. The only reason it hasn’t completely collapsed, says Merryn Somerset Webb, is because the world’s central banks are playing a zero sum game.

A colleague sent me a chart this week that would warm the heart of anyone with even a tiny holding in gold. It shows the extent to which all of the world's major currencies have fallen against the gold price since 2001. Pretty much everyone comes out badly. Take a look at it here.

The currencies we all think of as being the strongest out there the Singapore dollar and the Norwegian krone, for example are all down over 70% and even the Australian dollar is down 69%. And knocking around the bottom of the chart, just as you might expect, is sterling down 83% against gold in a mere 12 years.

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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.