The enthusiasm for taxing the rich ignores the real rich - big companies

Big companies' profit margins have never been higher, and many of them are sitting on huge piles of cash. But they're not being squeezed for tax like rich individuals are.

We've written here many times before that the obvious route out of the Western world's current crisis is a lengthy period of financial repression - ie one in which inflation is high, interest rates are low, and states assert their sovereignty to lift money from the private sector to help finance their debts.

This is clearly a process that is well underway all over the place: witness the rising tax burden and negative real interest rates we have been forced to put up with for the last few years. However, a proposal from what the WSJ refers to as a "leading German economics research institute" has taken things a little further than most have so far been prepared to.

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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.