Savings and Moan

A good three years before the current financial crisis, some of the smartest thinkers on the economy—people like NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach, and billionaire and all-around economic oracle Warren Buffett—started pointing out to everyone who would listen that things were going very wrong. There were three major things that worried them: the unprecedented housing bubble, the fragility of ever-more-complex Wall Street relationships, and the savings crisis. In 2007, the housing bubble decompressed. In 2008, Wall Street unraveled.

Now it's 2009, and the last punch is coming into view: The scary economic story of the next year is likely to be the painful unwinding of the great savings shortage. Thanks to the catastrophic savings deficit of the last decade, we now have on our hands a spending and credit crisis that will make our recession much harder to solve.

Today's Wall Street Journal and others have pointed out that the U.S. savings rate, which for most of the decade was as low as had ever been seen in a major post-World War II economy, is finally going up. In just about any other time, this would be very good news. But right now it's not. Our savings are finally rising but not because the United States has suddenly become a thrifty nation. It's happening because after years of spending everything we earned, there is suddenly no money available for consumers to borrow and no money safely stored away for us to fall back on.

Remember the story of Joseph and the pharaoh? In our contemporary version, the pharaoh went to Joseph with his dream of the seven fat cows and seven thin cows, and the response he got from Joseph (well, Alan Greenspan, really) was, "Don't worry about it. If things get rough you can just tap into all the equity you've got in the Pyramids. Saving doesn't really matter." It turns out it does.

I've always hated reading articles about savings; they inevitably make you feel like you have been kept after school to write the same old truisms on the blackboard 100 times. Some writers—Warren Buffett comes to mind—have managed to write entertainingly about the virtues of savings, but they are rare. Stories about savings rarely feel like they have much urgency: They tend to make a point that we already heard yesterday about something we should do next week.

But there's more worth knowing about savings than you might imagine. Over the last weeks, you've heard a lot about spending, with each month bringing a new stimulus plan designed to pump money into the economy. In a recession, consumers have less money. The less money they have, the less they spend, the more the economy contracts, and the worse the recession gets. The idea of an economic stimulus is to make people spend more money to counteract this worsening cycle. It's why the Bush administration has doled out some $350 billion to banks to lend and why the incoming Obama team is talking about a crash program of emergency tax cuts.

All this money, however, is like a flock of pigeons released directly into a gale force headwind. They try to fly, but it's awfully hard not to get blown right back. Because even as the government tries to get consumers to spend more, there's a powerful force making them spend less—a force we haven't had to contend with in other recessions. To understand this force and just how powerful it is, you need to understand the savings deficit and its repercussions.