The Guardian has the story World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn.

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

There worry about the strike back is well founded, I hope. Excuses like the following won’t cut it.

He added that 98% of billionaires’ wealth found its way back into wider society and said the world’s super-rich employed 27.7 million people – not far behind the number of people in the UK workforce.

First one has to ask if those 27.7 million employed people are getting a living wage out of their employment.

Second, we have to think about the following information from the article:

Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

To me, this out performing the stock market tells me that the billionaires are using their wealth as a catalyst to taking an even greater share of the wealth than they already have. If their average take is more than double the rest of the stock market, that means that there is a flood of money flowing from the rest of the markets into the hands of the billionaires. What are they going to do when they have it all?