I read an interesting paper this week from the US Federal Reserve Bank – The Corporate Saving Glut in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis – written by Joseph Gruber and Steven Kamin. It was published in October 2015 as part of their International Finance Discussion Papers (Number 1150). Essentially, the paper documents a rather substantial “increase in the net lending … of non-financial corporations in the years preceding and especially following the Global Financial Crisis”. Their results cast doubt on the notion that the decline in productive investment over the last 15 years or so reflects a desire by firms to “strengthen their balance sheets”. These trends have significant implications for how we view fiscal positions and the normality or otherwise of particular deficit or surplus outcomes. The authors do not tease out those implications so I thought I would.