The same changes are happening, just faster

From international relations to working from home, the coronavirus outbreak hasn't so much radically changed the world as sped up changes that were already happening, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

The US and China: coronavirus will only hasten their break up © AFP via Getty Images

If there is a consensus about anything, it is that the world we emerge to post-GVC (the Great Virus Crisis) will be different from our pre-GVC world. We will, we are told, find that in both big and small ways our world has changed direction. We aren’t so sure. There were already huge shifts in global economies, politics, markets and for that matter, lifestyles, under way. It looks to us as if the crisis will not change their direction. It will just speed them up.

That’s true of smaller things: significant numbers of people were already working from home, for example – after the summer more will do it and more often than they did in January. The same goes for things such as cash usage: we were all cutting down anyway – this just gets us used to a digital world faster – for good or bad (see my blog for more). But it is equally true of the big stuff.

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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.