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M&G is one of the UK fund managers - Aberdeen and F&C are others - which has been round the block a few times and seen its share of booms and recessions. Such firms have a certain gravitas and credibility in spotting trends.
Hence the interest in the announcement by M&G earlier this week that it plans to launch a fund designed to beat inflation - which it will do by investing where possible in corporate inflation-linked bonds.
More astute readers will have noted that there are not many company bonds out there which have a guaranteed link to inflation. Some major debt issuers - National Grid springs to mind - have issued them, as have other utilities, but there is very little out there from mainstream companies.
The argument is that these companies have revenues which are linked to inflation - their regulators permit them to increase prices broadly in line with the cost of living - so it makes sense to borrow on the same terms, the more so as offering a guarantee against inflation means that the core interest rate before top up will be lower than they would otherwise have to pay.
But other companies -such as, for example, Tesco - whose revenues are also closely linked to inflation have not gone down this route.
Yet the demand from investors is certainly there. The needs of pension funds have been met, though not always adequately, by Government, which has issued a fair amount of index-linked debt over the years so that this now accounts for roughly a fifth of the national debt.
But M&G believes there is also a pent-up demand among retail investors -people out there who are at a stage in their life when they desperately need to protect their savings against the possibility of inflation.
To prove the point, it reminds us how an index-linked certificate marketed by National Savings & Investments was so popular it had to be withdrawn quickly - as was an index-linked Individual Savings Account from the Cheshire Building Society, which also sold out in double-quick time.
The point M&G is anxious to make is that launching this fund at this time does not mean it believes inflation is about to return. However, the quarterly forecasts from the Bank of England have given significantly more emphasis to the possibility that it could.
The risk of what is known as a tail event - either inflation or deflation - is three times higher than it was a couple of years ago. Obviously no one knows. People of a certain age - such as me - who remember inflation hitting 26% a year in the 1970s and running regularly in other years at more than 10% find it hard to believe that the current policy of near-zero interest rates, and printing vast amounts of money which is used by the Bank of England to buy Government debt, can end in any other way than by debasing the currency.
Those too young to remember the traumas of those years don't carry the same prejudices, and are therefore relaxed about it. Inflation pessimists look to Zimbabwe as an example of how it can go wrong; inflation optimists look to Japan to show that you can pump billions into the economy and still have deflation.
So this new fund is about meeting a potential need, not making a forecast. When it launched a high-yield fund in the 1990s, M&G recognised that in a world of tumbling interest rates investors were looking for income. Back then there was very little high-yield stuff in Europe, but the timing proved astute and the market took off.
It could happen again because companies do not have to believe inflation is round the corner to issue inflation-linked bonds. Indeed, the opposite is true. The less companies believe inflation will return, the more it makes sense for them to issue linkers.
If they are right, they will get the benefit of the lower core interest rate that inflation-linked bonds carry, but they will not incur any obligation to match an increase in the Retail Prices Index, as there will have been none.
Given that finance directors can also use the swaps market to fine-tune what they have to pay and receive, M&G sees no reason why inflation-linked bonds should not in time also rise to about 20% of the corporate market. The firm may have to wait a few years - but that is the price to be paid for being first.
