8
large foreign balance deficit. Thus credit must be given to the
consumer for having saved the show. His spending on durables and
housing made all the difference. In fact the peculiar nature of
this boom - driven as it was not by business investment but by
consumption - may to a great extent explain why it has lasted so
long. The utilisation of capacity was kept high by consumption,
exports and defense expenditure. Nor was there much chance of
ending the boom in the alternative way, by running up against the
ceiling of the system's capacity, because the imports offered an
easy way out. At one point there was a scarcity of chips which
meant a serious bottleneck, but the imports from Japan filled the
gap until the new capacity was ready.
II
It is fair to say that the savings data have been shown to be
misleading. But where is the bug?
No doubt it would have helped if the pension funds would have been
made a separate sector in the NIPA instead of being a part of the
household sector. The employer's contribution would then have been
credited to the pension fund instead of being included in the take
home pay. The separate treatment of the pension funds would
reflect their ambiguous nature: They belong to the employee in so
far as they secure his pension rights, but the surplus due to
overfunding belongs to the employer; in a number of cases the
corporation has raided the fund to appropriate the surplus for its
own purposes ( Warshavsky 1988 ) .
A much more general question is the treatment of realised capital
gains.
The National Accounts exclude them'the flow of funds take the
opposite view,naturally so,since they are concerned with all
financial transactions and with assets as well as flows. Would it