It's Been A While

Yeah, it's been three weeks since I did anything on here (yes, I'm talking to the 2 people per week who visit; thanks, Tony and Ella).

Here's something amusing, gross, and scary from the mouths of the boring:

When the Commerce Department recently tallied up consumer finances for November, it found that Americans shelled out more money than they took in. It was the seventh such month of red ink during 2005.

Kevin Lansing, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, tracks the personal savings rate -- the Commerce Department's measure of how much consumers have left after spending is subtracted from income. In November the savings rate was a negative 0.2 percent.

Given how much red ink households racked up in the first 11 months of last year, Lansing said the nation's personal savings rate could well be negative for all of 2005.

That, he added, would be "the first such occurrence since the Great Depression."

The term "savings rate" may be a misnomer. Keith Leggett, senior economist with the American Bankers Association, described the measure as a tally of all the income that isn't spent.

"Savings is the absence of consumption,'' he said.

Bankers...they say the darndest things!