Justin Fox, Columnist

(Some) Americans Are Saving (Some) Money Again

First the savings rate was too low. Now some say it's too high. So what's the right number anyway?

May 1, 2017 at 7:39 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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The personal savings rate in the U.S. was 5.9 percent of disposable income in March. I saw that in the Bureau of Economic Analysis's personal income and outlays report this morning, and thought, Isn't that higher than it used to be? Indeed it is significantly higher than it was a decade ago (although it's a lot lower than it was anytime before the 1980s).

The U.S. savings rate is also higher than it used to be relative to other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (that is, affluent countries). Here's how things stood in 1995: