Saving vs. Spending

This new Gallup survey is kind of surprising – I thought the nation was slowly headed back to its spendthrift ways with the official savings rate having dipped back into the low single-digits after a brief sobering up period following the financial crisis. Apparently not.

These results are downright un-American.

Of course, it bears repeating that us ‘Mericans often say and do two very different things as evidenced by the repeated divergence between measures of consumer confidence and consumer spending over the years. This may be another one of those cases.

While the nation continues to develerage after decades of overborrowing and overspending (as is clear when looking at the ongoing decline in outstanding credit card debt), maybe the operative word in the survey above is “enjoy”. Maybe we just don’t get the same pleasure from spending as we used to because an increasing share of that spending goes to meet basic needs rather than to buy trinkets and such.