Signs of a top? One of the world’s oddest bubbles is back

In a world where everything seems to be in a bubble, one of the oddest has returned: Beanie Babies. Merryn Somerset Webb looks at what could possibly go wrong.

People buying Beanie Babies
Everyone was mad for Beanie Babies
(Image credit: © Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

No one interested in the history of bubbles will have forgotten the image of two furious divorcees dividing up their Beanie Baby collection on the floor of a Las Vegas courtroom back in 1999. The judge, fed up with their inability to split up their collection of ugly little soft toys themselves, ordered Frances and Harold Mountain to do it in front of him, taking turns to choose. Frances went first. She chose Maple the Bear.

By 2000, as the dotcom bubble burst and took a lot of peripheral nonsense with it, the Mountains must have felt even more stupid than they looked in 1999. Beanie Baby prices were in freefall. By 2010 toys that had changed hands for well over $1,000 in 1998 were going for a couple of bucks on eBay. Maple was all but worthless.

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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.