savings

Yesterday, I wrote a post which examined three different reasons the savings rate in the US could have been falling over the last year. Rebecca Wilder thinks this is a meaningless exercise: Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns is…

Why is the US savings rate continuing to fall? Three possibilities: increasing asset prices, debt-related stress, a surge in strategic defaults.

Stephen Roach is pulling no punches now. After quipping "I think we should take the baseball bat out on Paul Krugman regarding pro-protectionist statements Krugman made earlier this month, Roach has launched a blistering attack on the…

We got the data on consumption, savings and income from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). What we saw should definitely bolster the view that recovery has taken hold but at the expense of saving. The BEA…

Notable quotes in this 5 minute segment: "They don’t want to look in the mirror. America doesn’t have a China problem. It really has a savings problem. America has the biggest shortfall of national savings of any leading country in…

In reading Scott Sumner’s take on the China currency peg dilemma, I see that both he and Paul Krugman hit on the fundamental problem in the debate: reserves. Everyone is talking about the peg as if relaxing the peg will be the magic bullet…

Popular myth and, allegedly, the laws of aerodynamics have it that the bumblebee should not be able to take flight. Yet still, our good bumblebee refuses to be pulled down by such details and year after year it takes flight as if nothing…

If I could relate the concept of malinvestment to business administration I would do it using the concept of depreciation.  Depreciation is a term used in accounting and business to represent a writedown of a real asset on a…

I have sifted through the most recent personal income data and wanted to show you a few charts that might indicate where we’re heading. First, there is personal income.  It’s fallen off a cliff since the recession began. Looking at…

I am in the process of crunching the numbers from today’s report on U.S. personal income and outlays. The monthly data came out at 8:30 EST this morning but I think the quarterly data is more interesting because it goes back to 1947, where…