—“What would happen to the US economy if (scenario 1) the top 5% unleashed all their savings or (scenario 2) put away gradually more into savings?”—
I think others have answered this closely but I’ll try to add some precision:
*There are no such savings to be unleashed*. It’s already put to use, mostly in home and business real estate – providing home ownership that could not exist otherwise.
Why? Fiat currency inflation makes it impossible to save. You have to put your money to work just to try to preserve value. Why fiat currency inflation? Because we try to artificially increase employment by artificially stimulating consumption, by artificially discounting the price of credit, by artificially producing ‘money’ by simply debiting and crediting treasury and bank accounts.
The Cathedral (Academy – Media – State complex that replaced the military industrial complex ) quite intentionally misrepresent the fact that owning (controlling) money, is different from having (storing) it.
For the (a) voluntary organization of production, distribution, and trade, to evolve into (b) patterns (networks) of specialization and trade, and into (c) markets that provide continuous adaptation to demand, shocks, innovation, and continuously reduce prices money(wealth, capital) must be organized into a pareto distribution (20% of the population must control at least 80% of the capital), and within that pareto distribution’s 20% another pareto distribution, and so on. (Really, it has to be so. It’s just math and incentives.)
The reason goods get cheaper is that people at the top of any distribution (and at every level under it) seek signals. We can virtue signal (words), we can membership signal (dress), we can status signal (consumption).
People at the tops of distributions pay for research and development in signals, that then decrease in cost and increase in ownership. Hence why Gucci bags, and Ferrari’s (neither of which are expensive to produce) are so expensive: to make them scarce, and therefore to preserve their signal value. (Hence why iphones can be so profitable for apple: signal value.)
Because really, all we all do is chase status signals like mice, hamsters, rats , and squirrels, in the squirrel cage wheel.
The greatest subconscious fear of humans is ‘being left behind’.
Hence: status signals.