Even the poorest EU countries are actually surprisingly wealthy.

Bulgaria was switching to Euro on the new year’s eve and the easiest way to convert Leva to Euro was to put the money into the bank, so Bulgarian deposits reached 100B+ levas into personal accounts by November which converts to ~50B+ Euros. Which is over 10K Euros per Bulgarian adult. Not bad for the poorest country, considering that home ownership rate is also very high(%86 IIRC).

The life is pretty good for a GDP per capita of $18K.

Home ownership can be a deceptive stat in Eastern Europe - many people don't register their address at the place they rent - in part because they're renting it under the table.

Tons of folks also live with their parents into their 30s.

The Spanish taxman announced this week they will consider a taxable gift when adults live at their parents home. Anything to keep the juicy inflation-adjusted pensions and their votes.

When people talk about EU home ownership, savings, etc. they often neglect to mention the skew of the Boomer class. It really sucks for young people.

Those numbers are quite off. The total amount of Leva in circulation at the end of 2024 was round 30B. End of November 2025 in circulation around 23B.

Here’s a source: https://sofiaglobe.com/2025/12/23/on-the-eve-of-the-euro-zon...

By the mid January %58 of the leva were removed from circulation BTW.

Total deposits in the bank accounts sure. I understood it as they deposited 100B of their cash into their bank accounts by November.

fair, edited for clarification

The Europeans I know seem to save in actual bank savings accounts, whereas the Americans I know seem to invest their money. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't find a description of "savings" on those charts, so I think it might be ignoring American investments. To me, they are both types of investment, one a super safe option with a low return, and the other a more risky option with a higher return.

From that Draghi paper a year ago or so, I believe part of Europe's innovation problem seems to stem from a lack of private investment by individuals in this way, so that would also align with this different philosophy on dealing with savings.

When private individuals have their money in savings accounts, aren't the banks investing that money anyway ?

Practically, yes. But in economics they often classify “savings” only as being in a bank account. So if you “save” money in a 401k, where it’s invested in stocks, bonds or ETFs or whatever, then it’s not recorded as savings because they consider that “investment”. So when someone says EU saving is 18.79% vs US saving of 3.50%, most of the wealth saved by Americans isn’t showing up in that comparison because it’s not in a bank account.

If it is just a matter of classification, then why would part of the problem lie on lack of private investment, when private savings are invested by the banks themselves ?

I think a big a part is that a lot of EU money is invested in the US instead, and I am looking forward for that to stop..

There’s a whole lot of regulation around the types of investment a bank can make with the money. Most of it has to be low risk mortgages, loans and high quality bonds.

Makes sense, thanks !

Isn't it a huge issue for Europe, that stock revenue is heavily taxed, while pensions accounts (which make the same investments) are not?

Which means it makes more financial sense to put the money into pensions accounts?

I’d be very surprised if that site wasn’t counting stocks as savings.

There's no "enforced savings" that I know of in Europe.

3.50% in the US sounds extremely low to me. It has fallen a bit recently but the savings rate was about 25% in France in 2020. Common knowledge says to strive to save at the very least 10% of one's revenue around here.

It seems like savings include pension ([1], but it is a bit unclear to me) , and that is a kind of forced saving (as in many places in Europe you can't choose to not get pension and get it as cash to spend instead).

1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

It's not clear to me either, but as I understand it it doesn't include pensions because social contributions are not part of "disposable income".

I think that "the net adjustment for change in pension entitlements" is there to take into account the expected reduced future income from pension entitlements dwindling over time (edit: in effect, making pensions count as negative savings) somehow, but it's unclear.

I looked for another perspective but the French national bank doesn't mention pensions in its explanations[0].

[0] https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2024-08/epargne-de...

Sounds like they don’t count that. They seem to only count disposable income and payments the company does to your retirement aren’t really disposable

The UK has "enforced savings" in the form of auto-enrollment pensions for over 10 years. Looks like Ireland is just starting to do it too.

That's mostly to prepare teenagers at the time for having no state pension in 50 years.

I have about seven of the buggers and I'm only in my mid 30s.....

Pensions or teenagers?

There is a very large and growing portion of the US that maintains no savings at all. In fact it's the opposite and many are slowly spending their way into perpetual credit card debt.

It's essential to the way the system works. One person's money is another person's debt. Normally the government would take on enough debt to ensure everyone had money, but the USA is a weird case.

Money and debt are just mechanisms to allocate resources. The government can print infinite money like Zimbabwe and it wouldn’t matter if there aren’t enough resources to allocate.

According to some sources, 1 in 4 Americans don't/can't save at all.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-e...

In the US people take on personal debt for something like a car. In the Netherlands (where I live) this is very uncommon: people save up, then buy it.

Our public transportation infrastructure is so badly managed that many jobs will ask you if you have reliable transportation and fire you if you find yourself without it. If your car breaks here it's often not really a option to save up for a bit first.

Part of "freedom", yes?

Also helps that most people don't start with an extremely large student loan when they have finished their education.

It helps that Europeans can go to a hospital or take an ambulance without having to open a GoFundMe account.

You would think the chance of this happening would increase the saving rate, no?

I'd argue accumulating too much wealth compared to your salary can be a bad thing - for example, real estate compared to salary is even more expensive in Europe than the US - so the extra money doesn't go anywhere useful, you just get to pay more for the same stuff.

Also, if the US person pays less taxes, but has to pay for a bunch of services that the EU person would get for free, that means the US person has a lower savings rate, even though they're paying for the exact same stuff.

Retirement accounts are more like social security than 401k. There’s no set amount of euros set aside for me it’s all in the pool paying for older peoples retirement

This doesn't surprise me at all as an European. My mind struggles to understand how so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

that's true to some extent, but at this point it's mostly a meme (at least the 60% number was)

> In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or “rainy day” fund—unchanged from 2022 but down from a high of 59 percent of adults in 2021.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-repor...

via

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/paycheck-to-paycheck-and-five-...

That’s way higher than I’d have guessed. Maybe there is some sort of bimodal distribution happening there. Half the pop is flat broke the other has multiple months of buffer

And yet there's no lack of demand for US investments, because they're attractive to foreign investors. (This is the flip side of trade deficits.)

I wonder how much of EU savings is invested in foreign countries?

The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs. Sure, they can print more euro but when so much stuff they need is traded in USD, that's not nearly as effective as when the US prints more USD.

> The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs.

That only works if there are takers for US bonds otherwise all this will do is devalue the USD.

That's the US's exorbitant privilege which no other country has.

it's true, lot of money is sitting in safe assets in banks

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2024/html/ecb.in2...

see also https://archive.md/xaiLU

"Europe’s AI ambitions are running into a markets plumbing problem

The region lacks the depth of long-dated investment capital needed to fund required energy infrastructure"