The Relationship between Savings and Credit: Reasons and Consequences of a Bicentennial Oblivion

Everywhere national accounts measure precisely the flows of the annual net savings of households. However, nowhere they are able to give the precise allocation of these flows between its three uses: loan reimbursements, real investments and financial investments. In particular, for some two hundred years economists have completely disregarded reimbursements, as well as the potential relationship between credit and the global amount of households' savings. These oblivions have many reasons, including the subordinate status of credit in economic analysis and the real difficulty to compute the “true” reimbursements funded by current savings. The consequences of these oblivions are very important. Without the inclusion of these variables, no acute retrospective study on savings can be undertaken. As regards forecasting, no significant turnaround of the household's savings rate has been foreseen during the last decades, neither its fall in the 80 ‘s - for which the liberalization of credit is largely responsible - nor its rise in several countries just after the subprime crisis at a moment when credit shrank.