Posted on 02/28/2015 9:33:36 AM PST by Kaslin
“If everyone saved more, we’d have a problem.” – Robert Shiller
Last week, in promoting a new edition of “Irrational Exuberance,” Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Yale University, said he is encouraging his students to save more, because the “golden age of investing” is over and investors will need to save more to have enough for retirement.
Then, in an interview with Yahoo Finance, he nodded his head with approval when the interviewer said that saving more “would ruin the economy.” Shiller added, “If everybody saved more, then we’d have a problem.” The interviewer went on to say, “Shiller is referring to the idea that if everyone saved more, they wouldn’t be spending money on discretionary items and the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending.”
Of course, this so-called “paradox of thrift” is nonsense and might only apply during periods of Great Depression when savings were stashed away as cash under a mattress or stayed idle in a bank account.
In today’s modern economy, nothing of the sort happens. If everyone saved more, the funds would be invested in the stock market, or in bank accounts where the funds would be invested in businesses.
There is actually no empirical evidence of a paradox of thrift. In fact, just the opposite is true. A St. Louis Fed study of a few years ago concluded that higher savings results in higher economic growth.
It also is not true that consumer spending dominates the U.S. economy.
My own work demonstrates that business spending (my B2B index) is almost twice the size of consumer spending in the United States, based on the new Gross Output statistics that the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) now is using.
Read my lead op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on this subject.
In short, saving more is a good idea, for individuals and for society.
Mr. Madoff agrees that the “golden age of investing” is over.
That's two strikes right there.
Just another day in Bizarroland.
Things that would have been laughed at 50 years ago are today's realities.
Believe it or not, this has been US policy since the Keynesian revolution in economic thought in the 1930s. FDR wanted to increase inflation so that savings would be converted into current consumption.
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUvm9UgJBtg if you want to see how easily Americans could be duped into believing ridiculous nonsense in the 1930s. That people actually believed this is demonstrated by fact that Americans re-elected FDR over and over.
Only the masses think that savings is good. The elites understand and believe Keynes. Even Republican elites say, "We're all Keynesians now."
One of my favorite Christmas parody commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uKnd6IEiO0
THANK YOU very much for that link! FANTASTIC!
Part of the problem is that when we were irresponsible we spent ourselves into ruin with record debt, and now that we’ve learned our lesson and spending less/addressing debt our whole Wal-Mart economy shuts down. This is why Pelosi said unemployment is an economic booster; she was looking at the consumer end, while stupidly ignoring the fact that the money has to come from somewhere.
Foreigners are no longer being trafficked here as workers; they are being trafficked here as spenders, and our government is quite happy to just hand our tax money over to them so they can go spend it.
I got more out that parody commercial than the half semester of HS economics taught by a socialist Reagan hater and CC version taught by a Krinton devotee.
Like my youtube comment mentioned, if this were a real product I would buy for me and a quite a few of the economic illiterate.
The idiot says, as the S&P, Nasdaq and Russell 2000 are at all-time highs.
It makes sense but for the opposite reason. The people are saving because the economy is bad rather than the economy is bad because people are saving.
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