Fear saving
In the public debate, the expression fear saving is used to describe the behavior of the members of an economy to react to doubts about the future by renouncing consumption and instead increasing the accumulation of savings .
In the political debate in particular, fearful saving has been named as the cause of persistently low consumption . This often has a reproachful connotation , in the sense that a large number of fear savers are not directly affected by poor economic prospects. It has also been shown in several examples that when unemployment is high, far more people worry about their jobs and consume accordingly cautiously than are actually threatened with unemployment.
In economics such relationships are indeed long been recognized. There they are not referred to as fearful saving, but rather as "saving out of caution" (English: precautionary savings ). Economists like Hayne Leland have, on the one hand, developed theories that explain such behavior as meaningful, because the rational consumer meets greater risks in the future with greater reserves in the present. On the other hand, these risks do not necessarily have to be real risks. Rather, a multitude of events can lead to the subjectively perceived risks growing (regardless of the objective risks) and thus causing an irrational abstinence, as it were.
literature
- Hayne E. Leland: Saving and Uncertainty. The Precautionary Demand for Saving. In: Quarterly Journal of Economics , Vol. 82 (1968), pp. 465-473, ISSN 0033-5533