Greed To The Nth

The world’s richest people are sitting on gigantic piles of cash that aren’t earning them anything | Financial Post:

Canny caution or bumbling oversight, the world’s richest people have retained huge stockpiles of zero-yielding cash throughout the recent surge in financial asset prices.

Their persistence may have, counter-intuitively, prolonged the buoyancy of those very assets in the process — helping to inflate the outsize wealth of the super-rich further.

With the debate about rising inequality re-invigorated this year by French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book on ballooning wealth gaps, the spending and savings behavior of the so-called “plutonomists” has rarely seen more scrutiny or had more influence on the economy and markets...