“The rich get richer and the poor…” People have long known how that phrase ends, but the astonishing accumulation of wealth in a few hands is now attracting attention from Oxfam through to Davos and the IMF. Eight billionaires are reported to own as much as the bottom 50 per cent of the world’s population. In the UK, just 10 per cent of adults own half of the nation’s wealth.
But why would this trouble the IMF? The answer is that such concentrations of wealth are dysfunctional for the economic system. They happen because wages are repressed and the richest use their wealth to speculate on assets that are in short supply, such as housing or land, producing sky high prices for property and rents. A single building in Hong Kong has just sold for $5bn. The effect is that small businesses close as rents are high, it is difficult for labour to move and there is a reduction in aggregate demand. Put simply, people can’t buy goods and services if most of their money is going on rents and mortgages. To keep up in this scramble, the population becomes laden with debt and those who sell the loans become even richer.
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