>Doug, what do you make of the contrary argument - that realized capital
>gains and higher pensions aren't counted in conventional savings numbers;
>when they're counted, household saving has been steady over the 1990's?
Pension contributions are counted as savings, but unrealized gains of any kind aren't - and there's good reason for that. To paraphrase Keynes, savings and investment are two names for foregone consumption - a diversion of income and production from the present for future use. Unrealized capital gains are purely fictitious values. To "spend" them, the money has to come from somewhere in the present, which generally means borrowing (or income that would otherwise have been saved).
With the market down, I suspect we'll see a lot less of this argument.
Doug