Decline in US personal savings - 25 December 1998

Well, there's good news and good bad news. Let's begin and stay only briefly with the bad news – the prospect of the second impeachment trial of a president in history.

A simpleton, a very nice European, asked me "What do Americans think?" To which the only answer is, every possible reaction that comes to mind. The two totally superficial ones, that are not worth going on about, I think, are one, that it's the consequence entirely of the Republicans who hate the president and the second adolescent reaction is, it's his private life and none of the public's business.

I've spent the past few days collecting remarks from around the country of characteristic views that are distinct from each other, So far I've found 17 and there'll be time next month to recount them. They're all fascinating and thoughtful and they're sad.

As for what's going to happen when the new Congress assembles on 6 January, or what will happen before then, the best comment I can make is that of a short headline over a think piece in the New York Times the other morning. "What next – don't guess".

The second bit of news is both good and bad and might be more threatening to the stability of the republic than either the public stance of the Republicans or the private character of Mr Clinton. It came last Tuesday on to the front page, the main news page, of the New York Times, whereas it's a topic that forever and always has been at best on the front page of the business section.

This is it, "Saving rate below zero". And the lead sentence goes this way, American consumers have recently been spending all their income and then some, sending the personal saving rate below zero for the first time since the Great Depression.

Some economists offer the explanation that the better people feel about their situation these days, the less likely they are to set aside extra for the future. Other economists predict a dire future for a nation living on a credit card.

So, pick your economist. The one who has a big placard out – The End is Nigh, Save. And others who, like a Harvard economics professor says, almost in low dudgeon, this is no time to tell people to stop spending. If he means Christmas time, a million shopkeepers chant Amen.

Yet another school of on-looking economists, who never profess to predict but just to remark on the passing scene, say that fears about the drop in personal savings are groundless. The main reason, they say, why the official savings rate is down is because interest income, which goes mainly to the rich, has shrunk and so dragged down all the other reported increases in income.

So, how to interpret which view to take is almost as hard as picking the wise view of the impeachment process. Somebody quoted a failing banker in Tom Wolfe's latest masterpiece as a perfect symbol of an economy, not on the cutting edge, but as we're learning to say, on the bleeding edge. This dreadful man, Ray Peepgass has 18 credit cards and is not sure he's going to stay afloat unless a 19th comes in the mail on Monday morning.

On the other hand, pray silence for another very eminent economist who says prosperity is based on the denial of thrift. This is a fact of life that continues to bewilder me. It takes me back to the only economics lecture I ever attended, it was at Cambridge, in, I believe, 1931, at a time anyway when most of the Cambridge colleges were floundering in the pit of the Depression.

There was one glaring exception, King's College, which was enjoying a lonely and bizarre prosperity, thanks to the investing wizardry of its bursar, a professor by the name of John Maynard Keynes. I went to one of his lectures, not as an economics student, but as the staff cartoonist of the university magazine. I was there as an intruder, to draw him. But in between my furtive sketching, I couldn't help hearing what he said, though he had a high, nasal drone, which was difficult to follow, even if English was your native tongue.

I should explain that I was alarmed by what I heard because I had a father who'd taught me one or two things, including the advice to put the first cheque you ever earned in a bank and at the same time, take out a life insurance policy.

I obeyed on 10 October 1934, five days after my first BBC broadcast, the colossal sum of 15 guineas. I closed down the life insurance policy a year or two ago. I mean, what the heck.

There were two words my father taught me to beware of. One was debt, the other, even though he was an insurance agent, was mortgage. So now flash-forward to Mr Maynard Keynes. In explaining the difference between the economics of public and private life, he said, "If you owe the Bank of England £100 and skip the country, they will track you down and put you in prison. If you owe them £1,000,000, they'll put you on the board of directors."

At the time, an economics moron, I thought this funny and incomprehensible, but it was a philosophy that inspired Roosevelt's New Deal and American government policy for 50 years, and it became so widely accepted as a proper way to behave that, only a year or two ago I recall, an American who won a million and a half dollars in a lottery, went to American Express to sign up for a credit card.

They checked downtown on his credit rating and they found he had none. No? He'd always bought what he could afford and paid for it in cash. A suspicious character. They turned him down.

I've drifted into this talk, not so much about the economy as the people's pocketbooks because I now realise most of the writing about Christmas in our papers, apart from the advertisements for Christmas movies and concerts, is almost exclusively about Christmas shopping.

The most striking item I've picked up on this front is that this is the first Christmas in which, it's been discovered, one American in five shops on the internet, a statistic that really sets the grey cells agitating among everybody from double-dome economists to the corner grocer, where he exists, everybody that is who's interested in the traditional American ideal of life, liberty and the pursuit of money.

But some things stay the same, to remind us this is a great formerly Christian festival. Only a skip and a jump or a good 3-iron shot from my doorway, we're at Park Avenue and can look down the long and a half mile stretch with a centre divide planted with small firs and now, at sunset, from 96th Street down to the crucifix atop the canopy of Grand Central Station at 42nd Street, each fir is lit with hundreds of tiny oyster-white bulbs.

By order of the Park Avenue Association, a tenants' group, that's what the lighting has to be. It's one blessing about New York lighting. No trees lit with orange, green, purple, red, white bulbs but down the long canyon of Park Avenue, those platoons of firs carrying fountains of white light. The only colour is the timed interruption of red and green, as the traffic lights change along 50 cross-town streets.

But, I must say, this year there seems much less public expression of Christian symbols. This is always the time when non-religionists, pretending to be freedom of religion maniacs, mobilise like a militia and pounce on any church, Roman Catholic especially, that has the audacity to plant a crèche, a Nativity scene, outside say the church entrance, instead of well inside the church property.

And when they find one there's a hue and cry and a legal suit, charging the church with violating the First Amendment to the Constitution – Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

In this city, of course, the most populous Jewish city on earth, the closeness of Hanukkah to Christmas results in people exchanging a card bearing a cross with a card bearing the star of David and it's fairly clear this year that soon the emblems of Islam will not be far behind. What these First Amendment watchdogs have managed to do, without meaning it, is to discourage the faiths from making as conspicuous displays of their symbols as they used to.

So how, in this very multicultural, multi-religion city, how do they greet each other? They skirt Christmas, just as we Anglos are careful to skirt at all times the crass phrase "Christian name" – first or given name, please. We say Happy Holidays.

I was going to salute you with the oldest greeting between practising or lapsed Christians, the greeting which is still the normal one in America, Merry Christmas, but in answer to an old enquiry, I've been told that about 30, 40 years ago in England, when breathalyser tests came in, the word merry had taken on a connotation of drunkenness and a man who ought to know told me that there came a Christmas Day when the Queen's annual speech ended with Happy Christmas. From thenceforth, that's been the word in Britain, England anyway.

Now I have, with the permission of the powers that be, to end on a personal note. I feel it would be callous to let the year go by without saying a word of gratitude to the hundreds of people from Libya to Liverpool, Sydney to Stockholm, who sent me notes or cards at the end of November and, another high-tech note, the thousand-odd who saluted me on the internet.

People who, as one man wrote, don't have to listen to radio any more, we download you whenever we feel like it, at any hour of the night or day. Well, all I can say is that I am, for once, unable to express how touched I was to be on the receiving end of this blizzard of goodwill. One man in Bangkok urged me to begin to live a long and productive life. I'm working on it.

And to you all, I won't wish you a merry anything, for fear you think I'm urging you to soak in the poteen, but a happy Christmas and a contented life throughout the new year.

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