The puzzle of the global savings glut may live on for several years to come.

America certainly does not have a savings glut.

America has a savings deficiency, not a glut.

The global savings glut is the result of this perverse relationship.

There is a glut of film, the quality has to be raised, they need to go to the next level, but I m optimistic.

The problem of current account imbalances is closely linked to the existence of a world savings glut.

American officials have long bemoaned China s saving glut as a major source of global instability.

Neither would it have stopped the global saving glut from turning into a ticking time bomb for the world economy.

But the EU has suffered from a surfeit of vision and a deficit of practical budgetary measures.

But what the world economy is facing is not a savings glut, but an investment deficiency.

Others cite the so called capital glut large inflows of external financing from China and much of the developing world.

US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke s notion of a global savings glut is a commonly cited explanation for falling world interest rates.

Current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke raised this idea a few years ago, alleging a world saving glut.

Ben Bernanke, the US Federal Reserve chairman, once famously pinned the whole US current account deficit on a global savings glut.

This East Asian savings glut enabled a debt fuelled consumption glut in the US, Britain, and much of the Western world.

First and foremost, there is the global savings glut, an idea popularized by current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a 2005 speech.

But economists disagree on why we have the glut, how long it will last, and, most fundamentally, on whether it is a good thing.

The fires of the US sub prime mortgage crisis were stoked not just by domestic regulatory failures, but also by a global saving glut, which sent banks on a wild goose chase for yield.

For example, while capitalism depends on investment and consumption, an excess of the former leads to production gluts, and too much of the latter causes economies to overheat.

If the US is unable or unwilling to run the required deficits, the global economy will flounder in a savings glut of low demand and cheap capital until another alternative emerges.

The natural interest rate was low because, as the Fed s current chairman Ben Bernanke explained at the time, the world had a global savings glut (or, rather, a global investment deficiency).

Indeed, it is misleading to term this situation a savings glut, for that would imply that countries running current account surpluses should reduce domestic incentives to save.

And the rest of the world? A global savings glut would suggest that rebalancing the world economy requires policies to boost America s savings rate and to increase non US households consumption.

US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke s notion of a global savings glut is a commonly cited explanation for falling world interest rates.

But such a link was seen in the early part of the twentieth century capitalism, some argued, tends to generate chronic weakness in effective demand due to growing concentration of income, leading to a savings glut, because the very rich save a lot.

The same problem haunts Bernanke s hypothesis that slow growth reflected a global savings glut. From a Keynesian perspective, an increase in savings cannot explain the surge in activity that the world witnessed in the early 2000s.

These days the Chairman of President Bush s Council of Economic Advisers, Ben Bernanke, likes to talk about a global savings glut that has produced astonishingly low real interest rates around the world.

My best guess is that when global uncertainty fades and global growth picks up, global interest rates will start to rise, too. But predicting the timing of this transition is difficult.

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of President George W. Bush s Council of Economic Advisors and a likely candidate to succeed Alan Greenspan as the Federal Reserve s chairman in January, has called the decline in real interest rates over just the last decade a global savings glut.

Construction of new homes has fallen about 50 , while new home sales are down more than 60 , creating a supply glut that is driving prices down sharply 10 so far and probably another 10 this year and in 2009.

Some blame a global savings glut for this state of affairs, and call for less thrift. But if we were at full employment, we would recognize that the world still has mammoth growth opportunities, and to sacrifice future growth for current well being is a second best choice.