The Big Picture

Vincent Boland: Magnificent Seven fire America ahead in the battle against inflation

As the head of Fed tells investors the fight has been won, the concentration of value in a handful of tech giants is risky and problematic

With just a week’s trading left, the S&P 500 index of US stocks is up by a quarter this year, and is just a few points away from a record closing level. Picture: Getty

In the middle of 2021, as the global economy began to emerge from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers were confronted by something they had not experienced in almost four decades: inflation. As lockdowns eased, brittle supply chains were exposed as ravenous consumers and travellers began to spend again. Suddenly the price of everything seemed to shoot up, and stay up.

The US inflation rate in 2021 was 7 per cent, the highest it ...