How a think tank plans to steal the savings of 23 million people

A recent suggestion by a think tank to cap Isa holdings would be a wealth tax in disguise - and a betrayal of ordinary savers.

A few months ago, I was sent some details on a new book by Guy Thomas calledFree Capital: How 12 Private Investors Made Millions on the Stock Market. It tells the encouraging story of how a group of ordinary retail investors made small amounts of money into large amounts of money by clever investing and looks at what their strategies had in common.

The answers are not particularly surprising. They tended to focus on smaller companies. They had saving personalities long histories of giving high priority to "learning, earning, saving and investing." They lived modest lifestyles, seeing "money as a means to freedom, not consumption."

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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.