Can Melinda still keep Bill Gates in check?

‘We are seeing very substantial inflation,’ the great investor Warren Buffett told shareholders in his master company Berkshire Hathaway at their online annual meeting last weekend. He was talking chiefly about the housebuilding businesses in his port-folio, hit by rising material costs in what he called a ‘red hot’ economic recovery. But his remarks align him on a broader front with jittery bond investors and big-name economists, such as Larry Summers of Harvard, who have fuelled the US ‘inflation scare’. And if it’s coming over there — pessimists whisper — surely it’s coming over here?

Maybe, but let’s keep this in perspective. Headline US inflation is 2.3 per cent but Fed chairman Jerome Powell says he expects it to settle back to 2 per cent, a level most central banks regard as healthier than no inflation at all. In the UK we’re below 1 per cent; the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee foresaw the rate rising ‘quite sharply’ by now — but only towards the Bank’s own 2 per cent target, where it’s expected to stay for the next two years.