The year the Fed went mad

This year will be remembered for one thing in particular, says Merryn Somerset Webb - money printing, and lots of it.

We haven't had a bad year at MoneyWeek. Gold hasn't outperformed as much as we'd hoped. But it's held up just fine and is sitting nicely in all our portfolios as a hedge against the nasties to come. House prices haven't fallen as much as we forecast, but London aside they're still falling in nominal terms at least, and so inching their way towards affordability.

The income-producing defensives we've urged you to hold for some years now outperformed in the first half, while the smaller caps and cheap European stocks we shifted some of our allegiance to in the summer have also done nicely. More investors now seem to share our concerns about safe haven' bonds US Treasury yields have risen slightly and the FT notes there is "chatter building" that the great bond rally may be at a turning point.

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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.