Berkshire Hathaway shareholders had money to burn when they descended on Omaha, Nebraska, this month for the company’s annual meeting.

Diamond necklaces and Cartier watches were among the most expensive pieces sold at a busy opening reception on Friday night hosted by Borsheims, a Berkshire-owned jewellery store chain.

“There were some big diamond pieces — diamond necklaces with diamonds all the way around — that were very popular this year,” Karen Goracke, Borsheims’ chief executive, told me. “We just sell so much, and watches are insane. I don’t even know what’s going on with the watch market, but we sold an extraordinary Cartier … It was so crazy. Fantastic.”

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Borsheims’ highest sales years tend to correlate with strong periods for the stock market, and Goracke believes this year could be a record for the chain.

The crowd that descended on an unremarkable shopping centre in Omaha to buy jewellery represented a segment of America that has been doing extraordinarily well financially thanks to their exposure to the stock market in recent years, shielding them from a wider economy that is seeing price rises and slowing wage growth.

The S&P 500 could see its fourth consecutive year of double-digit gains in 2026, driven in part by the artificial intelligence frenzy, strong corporate earnings and resilient consumer spending at the start of the year.

The US stock market has so far been relatively unrattled by the global economic uncertainty caused by the Iran war. At the start of this week, the S&P 500 had rallied more than 17 per cent since March 31, adding around $10 trillion in market capitalisation.

Steve Lawrence, 61, a financial adviser from Kansas City, said: “All my investors have done very well over the past year. The economy and the stock market aren’t necessarily the same thing. A lot of companies are making money, and their profits are up. So the market’s been good, and most of my clients are doing very well.”

Ordinary investors are buying stocks at one of the fastest paces in years. Retail investors’ net buying on Citadel Securities’ platform at the start of May was in the 98th percentile of weekly flows since 2019, while monthly net flows for April were at the 87th percentile of activity since 2019.

That confidence is reflected in consumer spending. Despite higher petrol prices, April’s US retail sales data showed that consumers were still spending in other areas.

Overall sales rose 0.5 per cent, helped by spending growth in bars and restaurants. Online sales growth rose, as well as sales at sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument and book stores. Stephen Brown, chief North America economist at Capital Economics in London, said upward revisions to February and March sales data “suggest that consumers were in a stronger position heading into the gasoline price shock than previously thought”.

Economists like to talk about America having a “K-shaped economy”: the theory that wealthy households are responsible for most consumer spending growth, while working people are struggling.

Paul Roy, 64, a retired property appraiser and landlord, believes it. “I’m seeing a big divide over the last four years of how the middle and lower class people are living,” he told me at the Berkshire Hathaway conference.

“It’s a complete change — because I see credit reports, and stuff like that, so I can see what’s going on. And so the middle class is moving down to lower-middle class, and the lower class has nowhere to go. So they’re getting eaten alive, because the inflation rate is truly eating them.

“The middle class — they can get a second job, let’s say, or cut down on discretionary spending, and survive. But the people at the bottom, they’re just trying to pay their bills — and just trying to pay their bills gets really difficult, especially when gas is at $3.80 a gallon. So, it’s bad to say, but we’re making more money off the people that are making less money, because asset values are going up.”

A large, and growing, share of Americans see economic issues such as inflation and healthcare costs as very big problems, according to a Pew Research Center study of more than 5,000 American adults in April. It found that 66 per cent said inflation was a very big problem, up from 63 per cent last year.

Inflation rose to 3.8 per cent in April, its highest level in nearly three years. Also, for the first time in three years, prices are rising faster than wages, exacerbating cost pressures for people who rely on wages, rather than assets, for income.

However, even as the poorest struggle, overall US spending is likely to remain positive this year as sales numbers are flattered by the confident higher-income asset-owning classes. 

Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta Airlines, laid it out for investors last month: “I think the higher end consumer, the premium consumer, is candidly immune or becoming more immune to the headlines.” He said that people and businesses last year “were a bit frozen by the dramatic nature of the tariff uncertainty”, but those tariffs are “not affecting individuals’ lives in a meaningful way”. He added: “As difficult as it is to see what’s going on with the conflict in the Middle East, I’m not sure that our premium customers are feeling affected by that.”

Ted Decker, chief executive of Home Depot, said on Tuesday that the chain store’s customers had been “remarkably resilient” despite higher energy prices. Home Depot shoppers tended to be homeowners who had seen a 50 per cent “pop in the value of their homes over the past several years”, while “their portfolios of equities have also improved”, he said.

The fate of the Strait of Hormuz feels like a distant concern for many American consumers.

President Trump, America’s stock champion-in-chief, certainly appears to be more worried about the performance of the stock market, than on the cost pressures facing working-class Americans.

Asked last week to what extent Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran, he responded: “Not even a little bit.”