In macroeconomics, this has indisputably been the year of Thomas Piketty. Rarely, if ever, has a single book so profoundly influenced the public discourse on a central topic, the inequality of wealth and income in the developed economies over many centuries. In an age of tweets and sound bites, the fact that a Herculean intellectual work can have such influence is surely uplifting [1].

The financial markets, however, have largely ignored the book, seeing it as outside the realm of their direct interests. This is a mistake since, whatever one might think of Prof Piketty’s policy recommendations, he has written a major treatise on the economic process that generates wealth in our societies, and that is exactly what most investors are trying to understand.

On Friday last week I was on a platform with Prof Piketty at the London Business School, and the slides from my presentation are downloadable here. The LBS does not plan to upload the video of the presentations on the web until early next year, so this blog contains my main points.