Was boom a dream?

[Christian Gregory]

> One reason I take the offiical stats seriously is that I talk to the
> people who put them together pretty often. They aren't stupid, and
> they read the newspapers too. BEA has already revised down initial
> numbers through 1999. And revising down numbers on profits, meaning
> the income side of the national *income* and *product* accounts, has
> no effect on the product side, which is the featured, more reliable
> set of numbers, and has always been regarded as such.

Two things:

Wouldn't the revision down of the "income" side only make no difference if
it were revised in such a way as to still be plausibly within the range of
statistical error for income?

Also,I was wondering, as I was recently perusing the NIPA tables, about
measuresof private saving.  If you discount capital consumption, this would
put US saving at roughly 3% in the most recent quarter, which I can believe.
But a quick glance at older numbers didn't indicate the lack of private
saving that Wynne Godley, for example, once talked about. Other than
"personal saving," (which is a residual number in the personal income
table), I'm wondering how one might derive a meaningful measure of saving
from the NIPA tables. What do you think? Am I asking too much?

All best
Christian