But there's another group of people who were more than offsetting that by taking credit.

And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted.

What we're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate.

Savings bonds.

They're savings bonds.

It's not just numbers on a piece of paper.

A 1 0 U.S. Savings Bond.

This is something I call the 50 20 paradox.

What's this building?

Save your dollars bills, yo!

He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate.

They work, they provide services to each other and they have savings, right?

So we're starting to pay for things with money that we have.

So this is a timely problem.

And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow.

Have you any savings?

I can explain. I can explain. Explain this, jackhole.

It's not even sustainable economically.

And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate.

Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece.

I guess there's two things you could talk about.

I'm saving up.

There was nothing to buy, unless you wanted to buy some rivets. Right?

Because I kind of view that as a reference point.

Until we get to this point right here, where everything starts blowing up.

Let me just put it into my mattress.

Well, think about smoking, for example.

I still have some money saved! I'm prepared for hard times.

Shows what I know.

Keynes called this the paradox of thrift saving slows down recovery.

Keep something for a rainy day.

You'd rent a smaller home.

Where maybe I saved 5, but someone else borrowed 5.

She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house.

I'd been cheated out of my life savings!

All the way to the extreme circumstance, to 2007 where, on average, people didn't save money.

This is people expanding debt, drawing down their savings, just to stay in the game.

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

Put by money for the future.

Do you know what this was right here?

I don't dividend it out to the shareholders. I just keep that.

So have you saved up enough money?

Then I'm gonna deposit the rest in a money market account.

Yo, this way to savings!

But then starting in the early '80s, right around, let's see, about 1984, you see that people started saving less and less money.