That matters because, at face value, it offers households a cushion against higher energy prices. Real incomes are set to fall as inflation heads to 4% and wage growth languishes at 2.5% in the eurozone and 3.5% in the UK. Even if you’re an optimist and think wages will rise with prices (we don’t!), this will take time. Continental Europe’s system of collective bargaining means pay responds with a lag while new settlements are negotiated.

So, if disposable incomes are down, then that savings ratio is going to have to fall if a consumer-led recession is to be prevented. The fact that the savings ratio comes from a higher starting point should offer more scope for that to happen.

And we do indeed expect it to fall, at least temporarily. It’s what we saw back in 2022 as households engage in what we economists call “consumption smoothing”. Cut savings in the bad times, rebuild them in the good. That might help explain that savings ratio trend over the past few years.

However, I think there are a number of holes in this story:

For starters, are households really going to be willing to part with their cash at a time of such uncertainty, to the extent that saving is a choice? It feels unlikely. My colleague Peter Vanden Houte points to the March uptick in eurozone unemployment expectations as one reason for caution.

And is the savings ratio really a reliable measure in the first place? I’ve always been a bit sceptical because frankly, it isn’t actually measured at all.

Put simply, it’s the gap between a broad definition of income after taxes and household consumption. That sounds sensible enough, until you remember both of those numbers are calculated independently of one another, using different data sources and in complex methods. And because “savings” here is simply a residual between two very large numbers, it is subject to often huge revisions if one or both of those figures are updated.

Case in point: when the data first came out, it showed Britain’s savings ratio at 9% as of Q3 2022. Data for that very same period has since been revised down to 5%. Pretty different, wouldn’t you say?

The good news is we have a much better way of measuring all this. Central banks provide data on actual money in actual real-life bank accounts. The bad news? No big war chest of cash waiting to be splashed…

Adjusted for inflation, the stock of savings sat in European banks is below the pre-Covid trend on both sides of the channel. Likewise, if you look at deposits as a ratio of household disposable incomes. That’s a stark contrast with early 2022, where economies were still lavishing in huge pools of “excess savings” – money squirrelled away when there was nothing to spend it on during the pandemic.