Inflation – who is our money going to, what are the consequences, and is anyone in government even asking?

Currently I am reading ‘Beyond the Crash – Overcoming the first crisis of globalisation’, by Gordon Brown, and this has prompted me to jot down here some thoughts which I have had for quite a while.

Has anyone explored the effects of current inflation?

We are all paying much more for energy, food, borrowing, and many other things. But this additional money hasn’t disappeared; it has gone to someone. These ‘someones’ have a vast amount of new, additional, money which they didn’t previously have. Money which was previously in the hands of the many (most of us) is now in the hands of a few (for example the owners, or the sellers, of the oil and gas etc).

What are these few doing, or will they do, with their vastly increased wealth?

Will they use it to buy property assets in the handful of ‘World Cities’, such as London? Will they use this increased wealth to buy up other assets such as property in more secondary locations; in buying other assets such as businesses and firms, in commodities, in investment vehicles; in buying up gilt edged bonds, or even riskier investments as they have so much money that they can afford to gamble and risk a bit. Will this lead to the bankers and investment houses holding so much money from these investors that they chase returns which further push up asset prices in even risky investments?

Is this additional money in the hands of a relative few pushing up, and will it push up, asset prices; and is this sort of inflation and its implications being studied and considered a concern, and a worry, that must be addressed?

I don’t know the answer to this question – I haven’t seen anything.

Does anyone know, and can they point me, and us, in the direction of this work?

It does seem strange to me that our governments appear to be happy to ignore asset price inflation and the changes in ownership of assets (as they have been for decades). But we only have to look at fairly recent (and not so recent) history to see what happens with asset price inflation, and ownership in the hands of a relative few: when the asset price crash finally comes the ‘real economy’ crashes and real people suffer massively.