The financial system gets reset

Things are very much different now, says Merryn Somerset Webb. We are entering period of financial – and possibly also political – reset.

It’s different this time © Shutterstock

Right now, the UK stockmarket is cheap. Our 15-year-average CAPE (cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio) is 13 times; our trailing p/e 14; our price to book 1.8 times; and our dividend yield 3.8%. Early this week, Schroders’ Duncan Lamont calculated those numbers to be 11, 10, 1.2 and 6.8%. At any other time I would tell you to rush out and buy. Fast. Some analysts are doing just that.

John Cronin of Dublin-based Goodbody reckons March 2020 may well go down in history as “one of the best all time opportunities to go long equities and banks particularly”. He isn’t alone: a lot of the analysts we respect are starting to see value in the wreckage. Do we? Not quite yet.

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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.