The Bank’s new emperor has no clothes

Everyone is making a big fuss over nothing - Mark Carney’s ‘revolution’ is nothing of the sort.

I've tried, but I just don't get it. I can't see how Mark Carney's big announcement yesterday is a revolution in monetary policy.

Look at the headlines and you might think something big had changed. According to them, Carney has said that interest rates in the UK will not rise until unemployment has fallen to 7%, and that, says Carney, will not be until 2016. So we can all keep borrowing as much money as we like for years to come, in the happy knowledge that we won't get stuck with the kind of interest bills a free market might give us.

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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.