February 07, 2015
Robert Schiller had an interesting piece in the NYT on how uncertainty about the economy may be leading to extraordinary low long interest rates. However, he adds in the strange comment that savings is not low, in spite of the very low return available to savers:
“Yet according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, personal saving as a fraction of disposable personal income stood at 4.9 percent for the United States in December. That may not be an impressive level, but it’s not particularly low by historical standards.”
This comment is strange, because in fact a 4.9 percent saving rate is in fact quite low by historical standards.
The only periods in which the saving rate was lower than it is today were when the wealth effects from the stock and housing bubble led to consumption booms at the end of the 1990s and the middle of the last decade. The current saving rate is far below the average for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
It is worth noting that the actual saving rate out of income may be even lower than the data indicate. There is currently a large negative statistical discrepancy in the GDP accounts (@ 0.8 percent of GDP), which means that measured income is larger than measured expenditures. My explanation for this unusual gap is that capital gains income is showing up as normal income, leading to an overstatement of true income. (Capital gains are not supposed to count as part of income for GDP accounting purposes.) if this is true, then actual saving rate could be as much as a percentage point lower than the reported rate.
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