Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Erm, About That Savings Increase

From a pretty good article in Bloomberg:

Consumers’ debt pullback is only now getting under way, said Simon Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and former chief economist at the Washington-based IMF.
The rise in savings so far is largely a product of mortgages being extinguished by home foreclosures, government tax cuts and transfer payments under the stimulus package, he said.
“As there’s an adjustment to higher savings, then there is a potential paradox of thrift,” Johnson said, referring to economist John Maynard Keynes’s theory that increased saving is good for individuals but bad for society as a whole because it reduces demand.
“To some extent, the government can offset that” with fiscal stimulus, he said. “At some point you have to worry about the budget deficit.”
So, if you're losing your house, you're in the "saving" money column. Good to know.

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