Daily Telegraph: "The gap between rich and poor will continue to grow until we give up on QE"

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"The world's rich are getting richer. The Forbes billionaire list was published this morning (there are now 1,426 of them globally in dollar terms, with 210 new entrants in the last year), and collectively they are $800bn richer than they were a year ago. Each billionaire is, on average, $100m richer than in 2011, with an average wealth of $3.7bn.

"It can hardly be a surprise. Across the world, stock markets are booming. Bond prices are also strong in developed markets, despite those same sovereigns usually being mired in a debt crisis.... Strong stocks and strong bonds are an unusual mix. ... What is unusual about the present climate is that so much money has been created by central banks that there is sufficient available to create a bubble in, well, everything.

"This has a lot to do with how QE operates. Unlike straight money printing, it is designed to transfer money to banks, not to the consumer or to the government. ... The main reason that QE has not been catastrophically inflationary is that so little of it has filtered down to the high street. For the most part, it has simply pushed up values across the board in the financial markets."