THE NOONAN VS. REALITY

Peggy Noonan is someone who gets paid very well to write nonsense, but that's OK because she is a conservative writing for the WSJ. Her latest piece is brimming with anecdotes that reveal not how America is feeling now but how small Peggy's world is and how ignorant she is. She writes:

They are taking cash out of the bank in preparation for a long-haul bad time. A friend in Florida told me the local bank was out of hundred-dollar bills on Wednesday because a man had come in the day before and withdrawn $90,000.

Here's the reality, courtesy of the Bureau of Economic Analysis:

Personal saving -- DPI less personal outlays -- was $545.5 billion in January, compared with $416.8 billion in December. Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was 5.0 percent in January, compared with 3.9 percent in December.

This increase isn't just a one time event: people save more during recessions. From Reuters:

The slump in wealth has coincided with an increase in the personal savings rate, which suggests households that had counted on rising real estate and stock market gains to replace traditional savings were now rebuilding rainy-day funds.

In the second quarter of 2007, when household wealth peaked, the savings rate was a low 0.3 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, it reached 3.2 percent. Many economists expect the percentage to at least double in the next couple of years.