The sticker price on a Gulfstream G550 is $50 million, but if you want one in a hurry you can pay a premium and get one for $62 million. If you want a Falcon 7X and, by the way, you really do, then you may have to wait until 2012, such is the backlog of demand.

The point is that it is not easy these days being enormously wealthy.

A boom in the numbers of ridiculously well-off people has sent inflation in luxury products soaring even faster than good, old-fashioned middle class CPI.

Merrill Lynch and Cap Gemini have developed an alternative to the consumer price index for people who have $30 million or more and it is called the CLEWI: the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index. The key goods in the CLEWI shopping basket are a pair of Gucci shoes, case of Dom Perignon, a Rolls-Royce, a private swimming pool and a yacht. The CLEWI index rose 7 per cent in 2006 compared to 4 per cent growth in the CPI. That difference widened markedly from 2005 when the CPI showed 3.6 per cent growth and the CLEWI 4 per cent. The monied classes have a lot more money.

And, as if that were not bad enough, the really super-duper rich are rattled by income inequality and seem to be calling for tax increases. This month Nick Ferguson, a private equity grandee, complained that people in his business were paying less tax proportionately than their cleaning ladies. Warren Buffett, the fabled billionaire investor, has now chastised the US Congress for reform tax in favour of the rich and at the expense of working American families so that he pays less, proportionately, than his receptionist.

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