Merryn Talks Money
Markets in a Permanent Mini-Crisis: Why Investors Are Waiting, Not Predicting
24 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From iHeart Podcast, Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. It's for Vietnam. They're pouring petrol all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math & Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. Coming up this season on Math & Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
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Welcome to the Merrin Talks Money Market Wrap, where we talk about the biggest moves in the markets this week and what is driving them. I am Merrin Somerset Webb, Editor-at-Large for Bloomberg UK Wealth.
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Chapter 2: What are the current market conditions in a world of mini-crises?
companies kind of stocking up ahead knowing that things are going pear-shaped in the middle east but the point is that none of these economic figures by themselves or and certainly not taken together point to an economy that is in like massive distress But the sentiment indicators are just off the charts bad.
We saw an Ipsos consumer confidence reading yesterday that shows that people are gloomier than they were ahead of 2008 and in 1979 of all times. So there's a bit of a weird disconnect which I think is probably driven by people hating inflation.
I think inflation is probably the big driver of most people's misery because everyone feels poorer and feels that they're being ripped off and doesn't see things getting any better. But yeah, the underlying economy is not too bad. I think the big risk is that if interest rates stay where they are or even go up a bit because of the energy crisis...
that we're probably facing, then that will knock a lot of that on its head, particularly things like the housing market and the wealth effect from that.
Yeah, I mean, this is, I was going to say people hate inflation, but one thing that's really, really difficult is general inflation combined with falling house prices. That's very hard for a lot of Brits. Tough gig.
Well, yeah, and you see all these news stories in the papers at the moment about people saying, oh, I can't sell my, you know, XYZ house for this price. And obviously the solution is, well, cut the price. But the problem is people have spent so long.
Yeah, but people have spent so long thinking that their house is worth X. And the other thing is when you look at the prices from when they bought them, and this goes back to what we talked about the other day, they haven't actually made any money in real terms even. No. if they get to sell them for the prices that they can't sell them for.
So I think people are waking up to what is actually quite a big hole in their household psychological balance sheet.
Yes. Yeah, so it is interesting. We've got an interview coming out with Andy Haldane soon, who used to be the economist at Bank of England. And one of the things that we talk about in that is something that we've talked about, I think, with Russell Napier and other people previously, which is about how household balance sheets are in really good shape.
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Chapter 3: How do geopolitical events influence investor behavior?
They stuck in this clause, which basically says that if they don't do it, we can force them to do it. And not only can we force them to do what they've said they'd do in the mansion house agreement, we can force that it's completely uncapped. We can tell them to invest in anything at all. The House of Lords thankfully kicked that back and said no chance that's not happening.
The government came back and said well okay we will just be able to mandate basically to the limits of what the Mansion House thing says so 10% in private assets and last night the House of Lords voted against that again and pinged it back to them.
And so now, basically, unless the government kind of backs down on this, chances are reasonable that actually the whole pensions bill will collapse, or rather it won't get through in this parliamentary session. And the thing is, the pensions industry is not especially happy about that because they actually like a lot of the other changes, which you can't go through here.
But the point is, I don't know, I'm kind of grateful for the House of Lords here. It's nice to see that someone's at least attempting to defend... you know, our freedom to invest in what we feel we should be investing in rather than having it dictated to.
I didn't know you were usually anti the House of Lords, John.
I said, well, I'm not. I'm not. I'm actually quite pro the House of Lords. It's one of these things that works a lot better in practice than it does in theory.
Absolutely. And it's worked very well for many, many hundreds of years, which maybe I'll leave it alone. Anyway, that's not our area.
Yes, we're not political at all.
Yeah, we are not political. On the subject of pensions, we were talking the other day, you and I, about NEST, the publicly backed pension fund that 13 and a half, 14 million people have their auto-enrollment pensions in and how we're not 100% impressed.
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