As is often the case with statistics, the figures I’ve just given are not the only word on this subject because the government publishes additional measures of household saving. One such measure, produced by the Federal Reserve, uses different source data to estimate the same concept of savings.
The Fed measure suggests that households have been putting away about 3 to 4 percent of their income in recent years, a little more than estimated by the Commerce Department. But, importantly, it also shows the same precipitous decline since the early 1980s in the personal saving rate.