How the bonus culture caused the financial crisis – and how we can stop it happening again

The financial crisis was caused by rich people with too much money. Redistributing that money would help get us out of the mire.

Most people like to think that overconsumption caused our current crisis. Thanks to Alan Greenspan's stupid monetary policy which kept money far too cheap for far too long we all borrowed too much, spent too much, and ended up with houses we can't afford filled with tat we don't need. The solution then is to run down debt both private and public and to consume less in the process.

But not everyone agrees. James Livingston certainly doesn't. In his new book Against Thrift he argues that we have it the wrong way around. The crisis was, he claims, caused not by overconsumption but by underconsumption. And the underconsumption being caused by the deleveraging we are forcing across our economies will, he says, be the thing that prolongs it too.

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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.