Margareta Pagano: The super-rich still rule our economy

In this season of grand and gloomy forecasts, retail experts are unusually united in predicting carnage on the high street but they are slower to agree about the future of shopping for the super rich.

You might ask, at a time like this, whether we should even care but I'll get to that later. The crash in the sales of designer handbags has been widely interpreted as a sure-fire indicator that things are really serious for the super rich. At the top end of the market things are more complicated than that.

Examine Covent Garden's Kraken Opus, a 4,000sq ft shop – or should I say shrine – devoted to selling the most expensive books in the world. Prices start at around £3,000 and go up to £20,000. For this you get a book bigger than the average coffee table, packed with signature shots by the world's top photographers and illustrated by some of the world's top artists.

The books weigh about 35kg each and measure about half a metre. Kraken claims to provide: "Greatness immortalised greatly." And they feature celebrities like footballer Diego Maradona and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, as well as covering The Saatchi Gallery and Formula One. At auction in Dubai, one collector paid $1.6m (£1.08m) for the Manchester United Opus.

Kraken's founder, Karl Fowler, says demand for his extraordinary books is enormous – he would, wouldn't he? – but Fowler says this is a great time to expand and plans to open another 12 shops this year. Previously, the books had been available only by word of mouth – bought by that new global nobility: a second generation of the super-rich who never travel "commercial" when they flit from capital to capital. Another London shop they visit is Zilli's, the French luxury high-end menswear retailer on New Bond Street. Zilli's has just finished the best two months trading since it opened more than 20 years ago. Its hand-made cashmere and chinchilla coats sell for £8,000 each and they have been walking out of the door. But Zilli's best customers are not regular shoppers "renewing their wardrobes" but visitors from the Middle East and Russia.

There are implications of this kind of elite spending that reach further than the style page of glossy magazines. While it might be irritating to admit that the trivial shopping decisions of a handful of the super rich have any real significance for the global economy, they cannot be ignored. It is a fact that the buying power of this new global nobility has assumed more than a mythical status when it comes to creating wealth. Zilli's £8,000 cashmere jacket, for example, supports 300 jobs in Lyons, where the garments are hand-stitched, and the staff in its shops.

The big question being asked by analysts, though, is how visible this tribe will be over the coming months and to what extent it will be hit by the economic downturn. Oil prices have tumbled, hurting some of this elite, while the financial crisis is forcing others to reschedule their debt and rejig their empires, though there is still big money around.

More importantly (and more than they care to admit) the industry analysts who are so quick to go public on the death of the high street are privately spending a great deal of their time tracking the habits of these exclusive tribes. They are in no doubt about the link between their future and ours.