Looking on the bright side

The great virus crisis is miserable in many ways. But there are glimmers of positivity, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

It’s not all bad. It really isn’t. The great virus crisis is utterly miserable in far too many obvious ways for far too many people. But there is perhaps a glimmer of positivity to be found in the way it is also helping us cut through a lot of the world’s waffle and look at some of our core problems a little more clearly. We cover a good few of these things in this issue (our fifth done entirely from home!).

First and probably most importantly it looks like increasing numbers of us will begin to understand that inflation is the only even vaguely kind answer to our long-term economic problems – and that as soon as we get on with creating it the better. We may even start to think that a fairly comprehensive debt jubilee would be the most painless way of achieving just that. Listen to my podcast with the expert on jubilees, Steve Keen, this week and see John’s thoughts on the matter. (Key point: it is possible for jubilees to be fair even to those who do not have debt.)

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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.