growth rate is coming down and the natural rate is coming with it. What was the first part of your question? Well, my first question was, what is the neutral rate of interest for people that don't know? And then what is the relationship between the neutral rate and the savings rate? How does savings, in other words, impact the natural rate of interest? Up until now, the impact has not been that important because you see, 2023 was only the eighth year in which we had negative national savings since 1929. And the other seven years, they were all when we were in serious economic contractions. Well, four of the negative national savings occurred in the 1930s. And then we had three negative national savings in 2008, time 10. Very, very rare, but it was not a persistent condition. But now we have a very, very difficult problem and one that at least to me appears very difficult to resolve. Before now, we had an excessive debt in this problem using the production function, which indicated the (30/41)
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