You're getting hammered for your comment, but you're not wrong. This article is far more political than economic. It's politics is attack the rich; and as for its economics, it's a lot of neo-Keynesian trash.
The article claims that savings by the rich is fueling both consumer debt and government debt, when in fact it's closer to the other way around. Government debt — monetary policies that inflate the money supply via government debt — is fueling profligate consumer spending with cheap consumer credit made available by easy-money policies.
No, Keynes argued that the rich keep interest rates too high and prevent the poor from taking on debt. For this reason he advocated for low (zero, actually) interest rates and programs to encourage more borrowing. Basically Keynes got everything he wanted and now the present outrage is that debt is too high and the poor are allowed to borrow whereas before they were prevented from doing it. In fact the long march of history consisted of a sequence of credit easing measures, even including government guarantees, in order to extend credit market access to virtually everyone, with things like underwriting standards deemed to be racist and in need of weakening. The end result is almost everyone can borrow today and at historically low rates which leads to, surprise, a situation in which debt levels are historically high. Then that, too, is blamed on "the 1%".
At least Keynes had a sense of history and wasn't walking in the Eternal Now.
The article isn't Keynesian, nor is Keynesianism trash. I do agree that ignorance is destructive.
Take away the word "profligate" from consumer spending and you'll be closer to the truth. Median real wages have been falling for the last 50 years. We need a little tightness in the labor market to change that, and risking some inflation in a period of negligible inflation seems like a wise choice.
Perhaps I'm painting with too broad a brush, and if we want to get into a technical argument, I will concede your point; but when I see multiplier effect and savings glut, I don't really need to see much more. The thrust of this is the "market" has failed and more government intervention is the answer. This is the destructive ignorance I'm referring to.
The article was crap, I agree. Keynes would be better characterized by discussing government intervention to address a market failure, rather than saying the market has failed, which has different connotations.
Personally, I disagree with calling government choices an intervention, because the government is a market participant, and both the market and government are embedded in the society which creates them.
I have a basic theory that 'journalists' don't generally understand math, economic or finance. For one, if they did, they wouldn't choose to become journalists. As a result, they surround themselves with a bubble of low math and finance skills and are prone to misunderstand and conflate basic concepts like assets and income.
Investment and savings must always be in balance. If the savings rate of one person exceed the total investment rate then another person must save less than the investment rate. The non zero sum answer is to increase the investment rate and put the money to good use by employing people. The article is about how that is not happening.
i.e. companies have stopped borrowing money and instead fund themselves through issuing stock but strangely enough they do not sell the stock when they need it, they keep large portions in their own bank accounts. If companies and the rich are not borrowing, then either consumers or the government must borrow the money. Consumers take on mortgages to buy increasingly expensive houses but as 2008 has shown an overpriced house is a poor investment that drains productivity from the economy.
Please refrain from bashing the journalist. He is not making up his own economics, he's stating the obvious.
> If the savings rate of one person exceed the total investment rate then another person must save less than the investment rate.
Yes, at the macro level, investment (defined as an increase in capital equipment or inventories) must equal savings in terms of national accounts, but incomes and rates as well as the foreign sector all adjust to make it so. You cannot say one controls the other. It is an equilibrium condition on a number of variables.
It's like saying that the quantity of stocks bought is the quantity of stocks sold - an equilibrium relationship -- and so whether stock volumes go up or down is completely determined by sellers -- a casual mechanism invented that satisfies the equilibrium relationship even though it is false.
So you cannot take an equilibrium result involving many variables and use that to deduce that one of the variables is independent and the other is dependent just by linguistic or emotional affinity.
Next, that type of savings/investment identity in the national accounts has nothing to do with financial borrowing/saving of the household sector nor even of "the poor" or "the 1%". What you are thinking of -- say a household takes out a mortgage to buy a house -- is a balance sheet expansion that is invisible to the national accounting and contributes nothing to savings or investment. What would contribute to savings/investment would be when the house is remodeled. So if I invest in my house by adding a better bathroom, then that will add savings to the economy as a whole. You can imagine that various inputs, for example, cement, are consumed in the course of expanding the bathroom, so the savings is the value add -- e.g. the value of the improvement net of the consumption required to make the improvement. And over the economy as a whole, if you add up all the savings (in terms of capital), you will get all the investment (when things like inventories are property treated). But this is not what the blogger means when she is complaining about "the 1%".
debt and credit are zero-sum. The part that isn't necessarily zero-sum is productivity. So, debt/credit patterns can lead to productivity, depending on the details.
But I think the real point here is that when investments are dependent on others' debt and not on other types of returns, there's a whole system that is built on promoting debt, selling people on accepting debt…
In nominal terms, they are zero-sum. If you consider inflation then debtors have the advantage since we live in an inflationary economy, so wages will keep pace with general inflation but the debt amount remains constant.
Debt is an essential part to accelerating growth if used for productive investments (say, a degree in computer science). What the "middle class" (really the working poor but people call it the middle class) are using debt for is not productive; when we have layaway and things like Affirm financing, etc. we have lots of debt being used to purchase luxury goods and services. You can argue the "system" is to blame for people buying electronics on layaway or you can blame the people for being irresponsible.
To whoever is going to respond by saying poor people buy food on credit cards: you can't use layaway and Affirm like services for food.
"middle class" is not merely a term for how wealthy people are, it can also mean like professionals who do jobs beyond that of the "working" or "labor" class but are not the capitalist investor/owner class that employs the working class.
The issue of debt used poorly for consumption that isn't investment (e.g. fancy TV), the critique isn't a vague "the system", the critique is that advertisers and sales tactics are very specifically designed to manipulate people into such decisions. But the "system" aspect is about whether the assumptions behind larger investment patterns are set up to basically require that such debt-based consumption happen.
> "middle class" is not merely a term for how wealthy people are, it can also mean like professionals who do jobs beyond that of the "working" or "labor" class
If they live primarily by renting out labor, they are part of the working class (for “intellectual” labor, the proletarian intelligentsia) while if their support comes from a rough balance of capital and labor (especially appyling their own labor to their own capital as independent business operators), they are genuinely part of the middle (petit bourgeois) class, no matter whether the kind of work is the same done by blue-collar laborers or not.
The article claims that savings by the rich is fueling both consumer debt and government debt, when in fact it's closer to the other way around. Government debt — monetary policies that inflate the money supply via government debt — is fueling profligate consumer spending with cheap consumer credit made available by easy-money policies.
The ignorance here is destructive.