For instance, sales of luxury goods such as jewelry and expensive automobiles were very brisk in the late 1990s, with reports indicating that spending was especially robust in locales where individuals were reaping large wealth gains from the technology and financial sectors. More generally, we observed a dramatic decline in the personal saving rate in the late 1990s.
Personal saving--which is measured in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts as the difference between disposable income and outlays--dropped from 6-1/2 percent of disposable  BIS Review 100/2001  1  income at the end of 1994 to roughly 1 percent in early 2000, when equity prices peaked.