Bailout

Chart of the day: Negative net national savings

By Felix Salmon

Mike Mandel is doing a great job at uncovering telling charts these days. Here’s his latest:

The personal savings rate might be going up, but that’s just thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars which the government is borrowing and transferring to the private sector to save. (Not the most efficient use of borrowed funds, it must be said.) Overall, the net national savings rate is at its lowest level since the Depression, and it’s falling: it’s now an astonishing -2.5% of national income. Any guesses for when it might be positive again, and who’s going to repay all of this borrowing?

Full post as published by Macroprudential on January 04, 2010 (boomark / email).