I don’t have pretty graphs to illustrate this. But just a niggling suspicion that Western consumers know their dollars, pounds, and zloty are worthless (relatively speaking)?

What incentive do you have to save if banks go bankrupt, governments steal your deposits, and impound your pension funds? What incentive at all? I’m not even talking about inflation & low rates, … but legalized theft of YOUR assets is still theft.

In other words, if you can’t save it, what do you do? Spend it and borrow more? Is that madness when you face confiscation of everything? Not really. It’s the only sensible thing to do, actually. Putting money in the bank for tomorrow only pads the nests of those who would steal it by inflation, sequestration, nationalization, or whatever other taxation method is favored at the time.

Even buying gold isn’t necessarily a safe avenue as Governments have been known to confiscate that, too. Perhaps it’s better to own nothing after all, just a pile of debts? Oh, wait… never heard of a government sequestrating your mortgage. Pity.