No two moments in history are the same, but I have found myself increasingly thinking a lot about the Eighties lately. It is because everyone is talking about money again, particularly other people's money: their property, the lavishness of entertainment, the extent of their staffs, the fatiguing ingenuity it takes to make a dent on the enormous bonuses brought home by the big City earners

It was sometime between mid-1987 and 1988 that people became overwrought on the subject of money, and then again in the dotcom boom of the late Nineties, though the talk was not nearly so widespread nor so intense. But today in London there is a atmosphere of gold rush, and the money made by the few who have seized the mining rights - that is to say hedge fund managers, private equity barons, the banking aristocracy, foreign billionaires - cascades to make lesser fortunes for estate agents, art dealers, wine dealers, restaurateurs, jewellers and anyone who offers a service or an item to sell that is in limited supply.

Last year 4,500 people took home a bonus of more than £1m. But there are those who make a great deal more than that - £10m, £20m and £50m packages are not uncommon. The total amount paid out in bonuses last year was £21bn, about one third of Britain's education budget

Whatever you call it - silly money or serious money - it is undeniably big money, and the world has never seen fortunes made so quickly by so many and so mysteriously. In New York - it could just have easily been London - there was recently a party for the top hedge fund earners held by a publication called the Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine (which carries a league table each year of the 25 best earners). Coming top was James Simmons, a 69-year-old former mathematics professor who is shy of the press and peered out of the party pictures like a man being honoured for long service in a book store. Using complicated mathematics models, he made $1.7bn last year. The rest of the list consisted of people who had made more than $240m.

These figures used to be confined to America, but now London, by all accounts a less regulated, more tax-efficient and civilised place to do business in, has its own super-earners. They are compressed into a few square miles where the competition to display new wealth is intense, if mostly hidden from you and me. Houses are knocked through, reinforced, secured against all disaster and hollowed out to accommodate gyms, music studios, swimming pools, dens, movie theatres and technology-rich kitchens, the inside of which the owners do not see from beginning to end of day .The walls are covered in high-value art.

This week the big auction houses expect to sell a record £450m of modern masterpieces, including a portrait by Lucian Freud of his late friend Bruce Bernard, which is estimated at £5.5m. Bruce had slightly more money than his more famous brother Jeffrey, but the idea of this amount being paid for his gently despondent countenance would have made him hoot with laughter.

The property market is hectic because of the vast weight of money at the top. Demand outstrips supply so houses can earn more per annum than their owners and estate agents are buying Porsches again. At Savills a pool of £125m is to be shared in bonuses for 4,000 employees with some taking over £1m.

Things are supercharged compared with the Eighties, yet there's much that is familiar. For one thing, the blind optimism that the boom will go on even though the world is palpably less stable. (It could end with anything from a threat to oil supplies, a big sickness like Sars or bird flu to the collapse of the overheated Chinese stock market.) For another, there is the resentment of the people who used to regard themselves as well off: the envy of those who were once envied.

Addressing his readers, the editor of Tatler, Geordie Greig, writes this month: 'The superclass is overtaking you in the race for the best schools, overpaying for the house you presumed was yours... they are leaving the central core of middle Britain feeling very left out.' One suspects the Daily Mail has turned on the people who run private equity firms, not because of their asset-stripping ways or the highly leveraged deals (incidentally, both reminders of the dubious Eighties) but because they have made the middle classes feel small.

Right down at the bottom, the underclass struggles away with few to champion its cause or lighten its despair. The Rev Paul Nicolson who runs the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust - named after a tax collector in the New Testament - told me how HM Revenue and Customs suspended a woman's benefit payments because they didn't believe she had six children. His charity gave her money to feed the family for two weeks while she waited for an investigator to come to count heads. Place that alongside the concessionary capital gains tax - as little as 10 per cent - negotiated by the private equity industry on its income and you begin to wonder if we haven't got things a bit wrong.

It is the inevitable remoteness of the super- rich from the community and the concerns of a society that rankles. Many high earners give a great deal away and do much good, but, because of a failure of imagination or humanity, there are probably more who do not.

The super-rich have a responsibility to the morale of society and also - more acutely - to the environment. The spending of these newly acquired fortunes on private planes and helicopters for instance, or on the construction of golf courses, such as the one planned for the rich by Clint Eastwood on the Monterey peninsula, represents a great menace to the environment. Fish are being hunted to extinction for the delectation of jaded palates. Rare trees are felled for interior decoration. Landscape and coastlines are wrecked for resorts.

None of this is alleviated by the suspicion that these fortunes are generated by financial alchemy rather than by business - ie, making or supplying something which is useful. In an article for the New York Times last month, political journalist Michael Kinsley described how the car hire company founded by Warren E Avis had been sold or reorganised 17 times since 1946. 'Each time,' he wrote, 'there have been fees for bankers and fees for lawyers, bonuses for top executives and theories about why this was exactly what the company needed.'

It is argued that capitalism thrives on this ceaseless churn, yet there seems to be no reason why the House of Commons Treasury select committee should not, when it meets this week, demand frankness from the five big private equity bosses about their personal tax arrangements, the treatment of employees of firms taken over and the escalating debt. For there is something vaporous and untrustworthy about debt held in a kind of digital suspension It makes the boom no more solid than its predecessors, and maybe a lot more dangerous.

What to do with the super-rich? How can they be integrated into society? Obviously the private equity barons should be paying more tax. There should be a self-imposed ceiling on bonuses, with companies setting up, pound-for-pound, charitable schemes, inventing their own projects perhaps which involve the active participation of their rich employees. I don't believe in supertaxes for the very simple reason that these people can simply relocate to another financial centre, taking with them the much broader benefits in revenue that their activity generate.

But I do believe in educating the rich in one simple fact: no one person's work is worth £10m a year.