What to do as the age of cheap money and overpriced equities ends

The age of cheap money, overpriced equities and negative interest rates is over. The great bond bull market is over. All this means you will be losing money, says Merryn Somerset Webb. What can you do to protect yourself?

Pro Brexit demonstrator dressed up as a town crier
MoneyWeek has covered many crises over the years
(Image credit: © Guy Corbishley / Alamy)

We launched MoneyWeek 22 years ago. There has been no shortage of crises since: the dotcom bubble collapsed within months of our launch; the global financial crisis followed; then there was Brexit (not that all of us considered that a crisis) and the pandemic.

Regular readers will know that we’ve spent most of these 22 years worrying about the way in which central banks have misinterpreted global inflation dynamics and about the long-term consequences of very low interest rates combined with loose fiscal policy. We worried that this has distorted economies, led to massive capital misallocation and driven most asset prices (from bonds to equities and houses to art) to bubble levels. There will be inflation, we said – and when there is, interest rates and prices will normalise. It’s taken (a lot) longer than we expected (Milton Friedman always said that inflation follows money printing with a “long and variable” lag). But here we are.

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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.