Beware: things are not normal

With markets are all over the place, it is hard for investors to know what to do. But there is a strong chance that the assets that have done well over the last few years won’t do the same over the next few.

Wall Street bull statue
US stocks might look safe but they’re wildly overpriced
(Image credit: © Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

This is not a normal environment – and there is no reason to think it should be. The last decade has seen a variety of extraordinary monetary experiments and the last two years have jumped every possible shark. We’ve seen rolling economic shutdowns, a new level of quantitative easing (QE), helicopter money, insanely-low interest rates, the biggest recession ever, and of course, the biggest recovery ever.

We’ve watched vast fortunes being made in tech stocks and in cryptocurrencies – and of course, in housing. Now we have supply crunches, the (fast) return of inflation, a shift in power from capital to labour, and one hell of a pivot from behind-the-curve central banks. With all that in mind you should not be particularly surprised that markets are all over the place, or for that matter that seeing through the noise is tricky.

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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.