What's really driving the wine boom – fear of hyperinflation

The price of 'real' assets – everything from commodities to wine – is soaring as the super-rich start to worry about the value of paper money. This could be very bad news in the long run – but in the short run, there is a silver lining to all this spending.

We worry about very high inflation here at Moneyweek. It bothers us that in the UK the RPI is knocking around 5%. It bothers that in much of Asia it is not far off 10%. And we note that the numbers are hotting up in Europe.

You might say that we worry unnecessarily, and that it is quite a leap from 3% and 5% to 15%. But these flips can happen very suddenly. What drives them? Very often it is fear. When people suddenly think that their cash isn't holding its value they rush to get rid of it swapping it for anything with intrinsic value they can lay their hands on. In doing so, they push up the cash prices of real goods and, bingo, they work up their very own inflationary spiral. And as so many policy makers know to their cost, once this has begun it is hard to stop.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.