"In the meanwhile the adjustment of US consumption and savings is continuing. The January personal spending numbers were up for one month (a temporary fluke driven by transient factors) and personal savings were up to 5%. But that increase in savings is only illusory. There is a difference between the national income account (NIA) definition of household savings (disposable income minus consumption spending) and the economic definitions of savings as the change in wealth/net worth: savings as the change in wealth is equal to the NIA definition of savings plus capital gains/losses on the value of existing wealth (financial assets and real assets such as housing wealth). In the years when stock markets and home values were going up the apologists for the sharp rise in consumption and measured fall in savings were arguing that the measured savings were distorted downward by failing to account for the change in net worth due to the rise in home prices and the stock markets.
But now with stock prices down over 50% from peak and home prices down 25% from peak (and still to fall another 20%) the destruction of household net worth has become dramatic. Thus, correcting for the fall in net worth personal savings are not 5% - as the official NIA definition suggests – but rather sharply negative. In other terms given the massive destruction of household wealth/net worth since 2006-2007 the NIA measure of savings will have to increase much more sharply than has currently occurred to restore the severely damaged balance sheet of the households. Thus, the contraction of real consumption will have to continue for years to come before the adjustment is completed."
My issue with your comment is that you jumped on a /bug/ in Facebook to push your cause.
Analogy: Let's say I had a car company that competed with a fictitious competitor, Toyonda. There was a news story on HackerNews about a software bug that caused all Toyonda Freerunners to crash whenever somebody pushed the gas too long. I then posted a comment that my car, the Legendary Esquilax, doesn't have that bug. It's self-serving and adds nothing to the conversation.
Now, if you said something like, "Our Esquilax line of cars uses an O(1) lookup on the rotor hashtable to avoid a backup of 'gas' events which caused the bottleneck bug at the root of the Toyonda issue." That would be interesting, provide useful news about competing products, and potentially spark a discussion about the "right" gas pedal algorithms.
About your comment on lecturing: I signed up with Hacker News to post a comment. Every person needs an impetus to join a community, and your comment provided that for me.
"In the meanwhile the adjustment of US consumption and savings is continuing. The January personal spending numbers were up for one month (a temporary fluke driven by transient factors) and personal savings were up to 5%. But that increase in savings is only illusory. There is a difference between the national income account (NIA) definition of household savings (disposable income minus consumption spending) and the economic definitions of savings as the change in wealth/net worth: savings as the change in wealth is equal to the NIA definition of savings plus capital gains/losses on the value of existing wealth (financial assets and real assets such as housing wealth). In the years when stock markets and home values were going up the apologists for the sharp rise in consumption and measured fall in savings were arguing that the measured savings were distorted downward by failing to account for the change in net worth due to the rise in home prices and the stock markets.
But now with stock prices down over 50% from peak and home prices down 25% from peak (and still to fall another 20%) the destruction of household net worth has become dramatic. Thus, correcting for the fall in net worth personal savings are not 5% - as the official NIA definition suggests – but rather sharply negative. In other terms given the massive destruction of household wealth/net worth since 2006-2007 the NIA measure of savings will have to increase much more sharply than has currently occurred to restore the severely damaged balance sheet of the households. Thus, the contraction of real consumption will have to continue for years to come before the adjustment is completed."
Nouriel Roubini, Professor of economics at the New York University Stern School of Business, "The Rising Risks of a Global L-Shaped Near Depression and Stag-Deflation", Mar 2, 2009, http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/255816/the_rising_...