The end of global economic integration

The story of the post-Soviet era has been one of constant economic integration. But that's now over, says Merryn Somerset Webb. And it's going to cost us dear.

Russians queueing to go to the country's first McDonald's
Better days: McDonald’s 1990 Moscow debut
(Image credit: © Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Russia is a poor country. Its GDP is just 10% that of the European Union, and there is much speculation about how its low levels of economic activity are translating into the various logistical failures of its war with Ukraine. So you’d think that deglobalising Russia using sanctions wouldn’t really matter. Poor Russians aren’t big consumers and the world’s factories aren’t in Russia.

The problem here is twofold. First, we have clearly been mispricing the things Russia is rich in – metals, grains and fossil fuels. These may have all been so cheap for so long that we have taken them for granted. But without them none of us has much of an economy at all. Who is richer, the countries that control the building blocks of modern life, or those that need those building blocks to run their seemingly superior economies? And if those countries are no longer economically linked, how much poorer will we all be?

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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.