There is a very common tendency to focus on consumption, in terms of where rich people's money flows. This argument that the rich spend most of their money on o

There is a very common tendency to focus on consumption, in terms of where rich people's money flows. This argument that the rich spend most of their money on ostentatious goods (e.g. fancy cars) or, in the case of this posting, donations to political or even charitable causes. While there is of course some truth to this, it ignores the elephant in the room which is that the rich DON'T spend most of their money. The vast majority of wealth (individual, corporate, and sovereign) is tied up in investments and other liquid or illiquid assets. One of the biggest symptoms of the current malaise in terms of inequality are the abnormally high asset prices globally (and thus lower yields), and most essential, very low inflation. There are huge sums of money in the economy that have been pumped in since 2008, but inflation has not shown up in 7 years largely because velocity of money is down. The concentration of wealth, and possible talk about technological deflation, are both closely tied up in this. The lower classes which tend to spend all their money - and sometimes money they don't even have - contribute disproportionately to velocity, now likely don't collectively have enough money to really drive economic and monetary trends anymore. Especially, if they are burdened by debt repayments which many in this day are.